The Unfair Advantage of Constraints
From a childhood in Istanbul with a walking disability to a speech at Oxford, and why I am starting After Code.
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Emre Turan
Director of AI Platform Engineering at BetterUp. Executive MBA candidate at the University of Oxford.
I write After Code: essays on what happens to companies and leadership once code stops being the hardest part.
In short
Twenty years in tech, from hands-on engineer to leading engineering organisations of more than a hundred people, and now an Executive MBA at Oxford on top. I have shipped the code and run the teams that ship it, so I am neither a CTO who learned business words nor an MBA who has never shipped. Most of what I think about now is the gap between a company adopting AI and a company changing how it builds.
After Code
Essays on AI, leadership and how organisations change.
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We Put AI Into the Old Factory
What factory electrification makes me wonder about AI, the way we build software, and the companies that build it.
Read the essay
Written for engineers, founders and leaders who want to think seriously about these questions rather than adopt another tool. New essays arrive on Substack first.
Read After CodeWork
Twenty years of building software, and the teams that build it.
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December 2023 to now
BetterUp Director of AI Platform Engineering
I lead AI Platform and Platform Services for an engineering organisation of 150+. Backed and scaled JANE, BetterUp's self-service internal agent platform. AI adoption in engineering went from 15% to 85% in twelve months.
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2022 to 2023
Getir and Gorillas Director of Engineering
130 engineers across 14 teams. Led the technical due diligence for the Gorillas acquisition.
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2019 to 2022
UNL Chief Technology Officer
Launched the flagship geospatial product and co-authored two US patents, in blockchain and geo-intelligence. Engineering turnover stayed at zero for three years.
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2015 to 2019
Deloitte Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer on enterprise systems, the last hands-on role before leading teams.
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2012
Kahve Falmania Founder
A consumer app with more than a million downloads. Sold it when I was twenty-five.
Speaking and Oxford
Oxford, and the occasional stage.
Executive MBA, University of Oxford, 2026 to 2028. Green Templeton College, on a Director's Award Scholarship.
Exeter College, Oxford. A ten-minute speech about advantage and constraints, given to the EMBA cohort. The first After Code essay begins there.
They did not only limit me, they built me.From the Exeter College speech
For talks and panels, my speaker profile and past sessions are on Sessionize.
Speaker profile