Founding engineer / fractional CTO — I build AI-powered SaaS products from zero to production.
15+ years, mostly at US startups as employee #1 or early hire:
- *Runy* (2025): Head of Engineering. Built the MVP for a NYC property management startup—led a team of 6, shipped in 5 months.
- *Edge Delta* (2023-2025): Senior Engineer at this Seattle observability company. Built an AI chatbot that lets users manipulate a visual pipeline builder through natural language. Owned billing infrastructure.
- *Braid Health* (2020-2023): VP of Engineering & Principal Engineer. Integrated ML model outputs into clinician-facing radiology tools. Full-stack: React frontend, TypeScript backend, Python for ML models, cloud infrastructure.
- *Toolio* (2019-2020): Founding Engineer. Built the technical foundation for this NYC retail merchandise planning SaaS.
- *SellerCrowd* (2011-2017): CTO. Built a Django/React social network for the ad industry from scratch to 20,000+ users.
*Background:* MSc EE from Bilkent, where I did research under Prof. Erdal Arıkan (inventor of polar codes, now foundational to 5G). Conference speaker (DjangoCon Europe, Øredev).
Open to: founding engineer roles, fractional CTO engagements, or contract work on AI integration / SaaS architecture / observability systems.
I hate mosquitoes with a passion. Might be the only species that I would want eradicated from Earth.
From my experience (based in Turkey), mosquitoes seem to be getting more and more resilient. They have become an annoyance even in autumn, and I recall catching one last winter. A few decades ago, they used to only appear in late spring and summer. Anyone have a similar experience elsewhere?
I take products from 0→1: fast MVPs, production-ready SaaS, and AI-powered features that real users rely on. Open to early-stage full-time roles, fractional CTO, or contract positions.
9 times out of 10 the company sells, performs a reduction in force, or goes under before they vest. 1 time out of 1000 the company is worth something and remains operable over a 5 year period.
Rules of thumb for the green engineers:
- Take salary/health insurance over stock in almost all cases.
- At some companies employees who are greener and greedier will fight/sabotage all their peers to get rid of them, is this the type of place you want to be at? Insider fighting is often a big part of why these companies fail.
- Never pay into start up equity. If a company "offers you the chance to buy their stock" after X months/years don't do it and if you do, don't put much in. Have an excuse so no one gets offended like "I am saving for a house" or something. If you're looking at a 5k minimum simply don't do it unless that is peanuts for you.
- Make sure anything offered is in writing and completely understood before joining. Lots of things are said at final stage interviews. If it isn't in writing you are not getting it. Ask questions be annoying.
- Negotiate. Its the only way you can actually get what you want. If the stocks mean nothing to you unless you get them quick, negotiate that. Start ups close doors extremely suddenly every single day.
> If a company "offers you the chance to buy their stock" after X months/years don't do it
This generalizes to a rule of thumb, "Don't accept any deal you didn't go looking for." Same as a trapdoor firewall doesn't accept any incoming connections.
Someone on the street offers to sell you a bridge, say no. You get brightly-colored letters from your credit union selling you car insurance, recycle them. Your friend wants you to buy a bowling alley with him, refuse.
And if they are not worthless in general, they are worthless for you since you will get squeezed out because funders and founders need to take everything since they are the only ones who matter or do any work (/s obviously).
I certainly did. I have options/stocks from 3 different companies, all vested, but zero expectation of seeing any money out of it. One of them recently went belly up and had an exit for peanuts.
I didn't go for big tech but I did pick a job on a YC startup that, while demanding, allowed me to purchase my own house and work on my own stuff in the evenings.
Your options haven’t expired since leaving those startups?
I recently left a job at a startup where I had some options vested. It would be like 6k to exercise them. I was leaning towards leaving em, and now this thread has kinda convinced me
I think the calculus is different for exercising options after leaving than the scenario the GP described, in which the company is pitching current employees on a stock purchase scheme.
There’s nothing inherently wrong in the latter, but it’s super unusual, and it’s pretty safe to be wary of startups shouldn’t do unusual things with their financing / cap table.
Exercising options post departure, on the other hand, is par for the course with any option-based compensation (note that this shouldn’t apply to RSUs, since those are usually owned outright after vesting).
A similar question arises with payment of taxes for 409a elections. Can be pricey, but it doesn’t raise the same red flags as a founder asking you to pay to work there.
Sorry, my mistake. It's all shares, I don't know why I said stocks/options.
But it's all shares. First from being early in a marketing startup that recently closed, second from being one of the first engineers of an event ticket marketplace that's holding on for dear life, third from a tourism unicorn that paid half my salary with instant-vesting shares during Covid.
How did you manage to buy a house on your own while making just salary? Usually salary at YC startups doesn’t get past $250k and that’s not enough to afford anything in the bay.
A corollary of this is “Always visit when a baby is born.”
(In the first few months, if not at the hospital)
I have noticed my love and respect for my friends who never visited after our newborn declined significantly, and it has never been the same. Does anyone have a similar experience?
Well, if you don't see someone for over a span of a year then probably you're not too close anymore?
Then I'd assume that if 1 person had a really good reason not to be physically around for the first few months, you wouldn't think less of them if they make it up afterwards.
How much of this is due to them not visiting and how much is due to the change in dynamics though? Think it's conceivable them not wanting to see the baby early on or in the hospital might suggest a fairly critical divergence of interests
Yep, they used flexbox to nicely do… absolutely nothing useful beyond blogspam.
Next up “how I made my ui responsive but then heroically stopped labels wrapping away from radio marks”.
There’s a reason, even if accidental, why writing custom controls was sort of a black magic in traditional ui. And that reason is, most people are clueless about how fragile ui actually will be in their hands.
I guess what I learned from the article is how crazy it is that developers are still putting UIs together with text labels and padding and flexbox-this and align-that. What kind of stone age shit is this? Back in the '90s we were putting UIs together with controls already polished and perfected by the OS vendor, presumably backed by man-years of UX research from those companies. The controls themselves had styling, behavior, event handling, and so on baked in. Fast forward to today's web development, where we've regressed to drawing text inside rectangles and trying to handle click events on those rectangles, and/or wrestling with half-baked "frameworks" that poorly do some subset of what OS-provided controls did 30 years ago?? UI development seems like cooking in a clay pot over a fire that you had to start with flint.
The root cause here is that unlike native OS controls, most native web controls are primitive as heck.
So companies that don't want to look like Craigslist end up either using an off-the-shelf UI controls library (not a bad decision, in my opinion), or building their own.
Along with the second option, a new set of disciplines is emerging: the design system designer and engineer. Since companies have grown so accustomed to building their own bespoke design language (instead of using the one the OS ships with), it's doubtful that a well-designed set of modern, native web controls (that ship with browsers) would be able to compete with the notion of "having a bespoke design system".
Also, white-label libraries (like Radix UI) are increasingly appearing that handle all the implementation details and leave the appearance to be defined.
Absolutely agree, there’s so much to lose with completed ui controls. It’s akin to the situation when you disassemble a device for the first time, then reassemble it and it’s always some parts left on the table.
Styling and customization are useful and interesting topics in ui. But instead of thinking it through, most libs today just throw a ball of wires at the developer who is clueless and often couldn’t care less even.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript, React, Go, Python/Django, AI/LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini), PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS/Azure/GCP
Resume/CV: https://ustunozgur.com/Ustun_Ozgur_CV_Eng.pdf
Email: ustun@ustunozgur.com
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Founding engineer / fractional CTO — I build AI-powered SaaS products from zero to production.
15+ years, mostly at US startups as employee #1 or early hire:
- *Runy* (2025): Head of Engineering. Built the MVP for a NYC property management startup—led a team of 6, shipped in 5 months.
- *Edge Delta* (2023-2025): Senior Engineer at this Seattle observability company. Built an AI chatbot that lets users manipulate a visual pipeline builder through natural language. Owned billing infrastructure.
- *Braid Health* (2020-2023): VP of Engineering & Principal Engineer. Integrated ML model outputs into clinician-facing radiology tools. Full-stack: React frontend, TypeScript backend, Python for ML models, cloud infrastructure.
- *Toolio* (2019-2020): Founding Engineer. Built the technical foundation for this NYC retail merchandise planning SaaS.
- *SellerCrowd* (2011-2017): CTO. Built a Django/React social network for the ad industry from scratch to 20,000+ users.
*Background:* MSc EE from Bilkent, where I did research under Prof. Erdal Arıkan (inventor of polar codes, now foundational to 5G). Conference speaker (DjangoCon Europe, Øredev).
Open to: founding engineer roles, fractional CTO engagements, or contract work on AI integration / SaaS architecture / observability systems.