Ali Burak Başaran Software Architect · Ankara / Istanbul
I’ve spent 15+ years building on .NET and Azure. I take messy, high-traffic reality and turn it into systems that hold up in production, teams that can make their own calls, and AI that knows when to say “I don’t know”.
Conflicting requirements, legacy code nobody owns, alerts at 3 a.m. I started out in 2012 as a developer, working on hospital information systems for the Ministry of Health, then on e-commerce at PttAVM, where I led my first team. That’s where I learned that reality never reads your diagram.
2012–2018 · Foundations
One deploy moves everything, and nobody is quite sure who owns what. At Mikro I moved .NET Framework systems to .NET Core. At Odeon we replatformed the B2B and B2C tourism platforms and broke them into event-driven microservices, wired to Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport. The lesson: find the seams and cut along them, one piece at a time. No big-bang rewrite.
2018–2022 · Scaling systems
Bounded contexts, event-driven flows, observability from day one. At Farmazon I led the team behind an e-commerce platform with 20K+ daily users. At Borusan Lojistik I moved a legacy WMS/TMS onto microservices for a 45% performance gain. At RoofStacks and GoArt Worlds I ran software development for 20+ engineers across both companies. Teams work like systems: best when they can make the call without me in the room.
2022–2026 · Leadership & architecture
RAG, fine-tuned models, evaluation pipelines, guardrails. Today I’m the architect at Doktar, an agri-tech company, responsible for everything from the backend to the mobile apps and building AI on OpenAI and Microsoft Fabric. The problem isn’t the model, it’s control: I build AI where “I don’t know” counts as success and no sentence ships without a source.
2024 → today · AI transformation
ABB—02Principles
Six trade-offs I keep making, whatever the system and whoever the team.
Optimize for work moving, not for everyone looking busy.
Choose simple over clever. Strong boundaries do the rest.
Measure before you optimize. That goes for architecture, too.
Design for failure. Production will test it either way.
Grow people who can make the call without me.
If a rule can be enforced in code, don’t leave it in a prompt.
ABB—03Experience
From hospital systems to agri-tech: the roles, the teams and what changed along the way.
Click a role to open the details
The only architect at an agri-tech company. End-to-end architecture across backend, frontend and mobile; .NET and Azure; CI/CD; AI systems on OpenAI and Microsoft Fabric; and bringing AI-assisted development (Cursor) into the team’s daily work.
Technical direction for 20+ developers across two companies at the same time. .NET 8 and Azure architecture, LLM fine-tuning and RAG for AI automation, and the roadmaps, performance metrics and KPI tracking for both.
Moved a legacy WMS/TMS onto microservices (+45% performance), halved response times with Redis, sped up queries by 60%, standardized SAP ERP and 3PL integrations for real-time inventory, and set up a GDPR/KVKK-compliant security framework with audit trails.
Led an 8–12 person team with a 95% on-time delivery rate. E-commerce for 20K+ daily users with 40% faster page loads, 70% faster deployments, 80% automated test coverage, and an ML recommendation engine that lifted conversion by 25%.
Replatformed the B2B and B2C tourism platforms and moved them to a microservice architecture: GDS integrations (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport), multi-currency support and event-driven services on RabbitMQ and Azure Service Bus. Queries got 60% faster and hotel search 45% faster.
Enterprise consulting for a wide range of clients, focused on moving .NET Framework systems to .NET Core with better architecture.
Senior developer inside one of Türk Telekom’s technology companies.
First team-lead role, on one of Turkey’s large e-commerce marketplaces.
Four years of enterprise product development as a senior developer.
Development of the hospital information management system (HIMS).
Where it started: first job as a software developer.
Education & certification
ABB—03.1Toolbox
ABB—04Impact
Numbers from platforms and teams I’ve built and led.
Response time
50
Redis caching · Borusan Lojistik
System performance
45
Legacy WMS/TMS → microservices
Query performance
60
Database optimization
Page load time
40
20K+ daily users · Farmazon
Deployment cycles
60
Modern DevOps and CI/CD
Downtime
80
High availability and disaster recovery
On-time delivery
95
8–12 person team, Agile/Scrum
Test coverage
80
Automated tests · Farmazon
Engineers led
20
Two companies at once
Conversion
25
ML recommendations + A/B tests
Daily active users
20
E-commerce platform · Farmazon
Hotel search
45
Redis + query tuning · Odeon
ABB—05Writing
Current series: Building Secure Systems. Four articles on AI you can hold accountable, from architecture to .NET code to measurements on Azure. In English and Turkish.
“The problem isn’t the model. It’s control.” From “Design Systems, Not Chatbots”
Hallucination isn’t a model quirk. It’s a system-design problem.
Writing the refusal and citation contract in .NET code, not in the prompt.
Measuring the same contract behind real Azure services.
Microsoft’s Agent Governance Toolkit, next to the contract I built by hand.
ABB—06Talks
For conferences, meetups, podcasts and in-house engineering days. Each one comes from systems I’ve actually built.
AI · Governance
Refusal and citation contracts, risk layers, audit trails: what it takes to put an LLM in front of real decisions.
Architecture
Carving out bounded contexts one at a time, and what a 45% performance gain in logistics actually took.
Delivery · DevOps
How pipelines and guardrails, not overtime, bought 60% faster deployment cycles and 80% less downtime.
Leadership
Growing engineering leaders instead of dependency chains, from leading 20+ engineers across two companies.
Keynote · Talk · Workshop · Podcast · Panel
Invite me to speak→ABB—07Contact
Next state
A talk, a podcast, a writing collaboration or a hard architecture problem. I read every message.
Ankara / Istanbul · hybrid