About

I am a software engineer with more than twelve years of experience building scalable backend systems and microservice architectures. I currently work at Udemy as a Senior Staff Software Engineer, where I shape the Reporting & Insights domain for enterprise B2B clients and previously led the backend of the Skills Mapping Service behind Udemy's AI-Powered Learning Path.

Before Udemy I worked at Turkcell on the SuperOnline CRM used by call centers, retail stores and field teams; led a cross-functional team of six at KG Teknoloji, where every engineer I mentored was later promoted to Team Lead; built a distributed face-recognition and security product at Nevalabs; and was part of the founding five-person team that built a national healthcare system for the Turkish Ministry of Health.

The work I enjoy most sits where system design meets people: drawing service boundaries that survive the next two years of product changes, making data pipelines legible to the teams that depend on them, and helping engineers grow into the decisions rather than around them. I lean on Hexagonal architecture, small well-named modules, and tests that describe behaviour instead of implementation.

Day to day I write Java, Kotlin and Go, run services on Kubernetes and AWS, and spend a fair amount of time in code review. I write here about the things I had to learn the hard way — Go fundamentals, JVM upgrades, version control, and how skill-based organizations change the way engineering teams are built.

Outside work I am a dad, a mentor, and an amateur photographer. This site is deliberately small, static and fast: no tracking beyond aggregate page analytics, no newsletter popups, no cookie banners to dismiss.

At a glance

Role

Senior Staff Software Engineer at Udemy

Based in

Istanbul, Türkiye

Email

nailcankucuk@gmail.com

Works with

Backend engineering, Microservice architecture, Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Go, Hexagonal architecture, Kubernetes, AWS, Data pipelines, Technical leadership, Engineering mentorship

More detail on the roles above lives on the career page, and the things I am currently thinking about end up on the blog.