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Mehmet Efe Agile Technology Leader with Passion for QA

Mehmet Efe

  • Los Angeles
  • +15 years
  • Full-time, External, Hourly
Mehmet is now available for hire Hire Mehmet

An exceptional generalist in software and digital media field with exceptional Agility and Quality Assurance."

Over 20 years of hands-on professional, enterprise experience in Digital Media, Software, IS / IT and Quality Assurance.

A track record of driving high-impact projects requiring strategic thinking, analysis, business planning and execution. Strong experience with enterprise consultation, IT/IS, software release and distribution.

Good team building and leading experience with organization, project management, excellent verbal and written communication skills. Knows well howto define and delegate roles and tasks, allocate resources and facilitate communication between stakeholders, dealing effectively with staff at all levels. An Objective/Values Driven; Performance and Results Oriented technology leader.

Adheres to the "Golden Rule".

Mehmet has an ongoing passion for WWW interactivity, a very rich background related to media and over 20 years of hands-on craftsmanship and hard-earned industry expertise in n-tier Software development, IT/IS, and QA under his belt and you know you need him. ;-)

Specialties: Exceptional experience in SDLC Quality Assurance and large scale multi-tier architecture and development projects. Experience in 'every side of the picture'. (XP, Agile / SCRUM) QA, Release and Change Mgmt, Leadership & Project Mgmt, solid experience in Network & Systems, LAMP, MEAN & MERN Stacks, Proficiency in UNIX Shell, experience in Perl, PHP, Python, Indepth Apache. Strong scripting, automation. QA, RDBMS, HTML / XHTML, CSS, JS, HTTP, SSL, TCP/IP, SCM, SVN, SOA, SaaS and most recently: Git, GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Rally, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Node.JS, jQuery, RDS, AWS, SQS 

Skills and experiences

CTO

Stealth Mode Tech Startup - January 2014 - Present (7 years 2 months) - San Francisco

• Raised seed funding, established a multi-location and distributed team; consisting of 10 full time and 5 part time engineers, project and product managers and managed them.
• Developed 2 mobile apps, a web app and a game along with full business intelligence, analytics, user tracking and profiling service in a full SDLC continuous QA and development process. (Python, Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5, ionic, Node.JS, Angular.JS, PHP / Laravel FW, MongoDB, Elastic Search)

• Series A Funding stage

Sr. Quality Assurance Consultant

Diamond - September 2019 - November 2019 (3 months) - Los Angeles

Assuring Quality for accessibility on major video/tv streaming service, conducting testing and developing regression framework across multiple media players and devices. Jumpstarting Quality Assurance framework for the team practicing Agile development (Kanban and Sprint). Project successfully completed to client's full satisfaction.
(React.js, MERN Stack, Typescript, Node.js, Git, Jira, Confluence, Android, iOS, HLS and hls.js, WebVTT, M3U8, Samsung Tizen, Vizio, Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast)

Senior Quality Assurance Architect

Cast & Crew Entertainment Services - August 2016 - May 2017 (10 months)

Developed Distributed Test Automation Framework from scratch for continuous Quality Assurance. Yes, personally architected and wrote the code to prevent my skill-sets from rusting! :)

(Node.JS, Express, Passport, JWT, jQuery, PostgreSQL, Rest API, AWS, SQS, TestComplete, Shell, Selenium on Windows & Linux) Worked as consultant, successfully finished the project and delivered.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Go Strategic Services / Extreme QA

Performed hands on Technology leadership for the startup in the following areas:
• Developing Mobile Applications (games, utilities, test automation) / Project 4E • Software development and Distributed Test Automation Frameworks (QA for performance, regression, integration and continuous build / continuous testing) for enterprise clients.
• Agile development and QA consulting
• Digital Media and Strategic Digital Marketing Consulting Services
• Marketing Automation and Operations consulting for various enterprise clients
• Managing a multi-location and distributed team of 12 Software and 8 QA engineers

Chief Technology Officer

ShopNation - January 2011 - April 2011 (4 months)

Summary of accomplishments:
• Rallied the development team around company objectives.
• Developed and implemented a unique Agile process organically tailored for the startup culture (a custom mixture of Kanban and Scrum)
• Led the company to successfully launch a finally and fully functional search engine, (Lucene with MongoDB)
• Led It's first consumer oriented viral / social product from concept to production,
• First revenue tracking and optimization system, (multiple revenue channels, CTR optimization engine)
• First partner launch (camped in the office for days and weekend to ensure success),
• First MongoDB cluster for scalability
• Recruited a world class engineer and kicked-off in-house data processing
• Established a very cost effective QA team and delivered full automated regression test suite, data quality tests and performance tests

• Improved SEO and kicked off a comprehensive SEO strategy which started more than a quarter million URLs to get indexed.
• Increased performance and response time from an average of 25 seconds per request to less than 1 second. (27X improvement)

• Brought uptime and availability from less than 50% to 99.99% • Delivered to founders a comprehensive road map

Director of Marketing Operations

Acxiom - December 2009 - October 2010 (11 months)

Established Marketing Operations from scratch; defined the charter, built
the team and delivered the operational / executional arm of marketing leadership to bridge the change management, QA, communication, process, capacity, project management, planning and knowledge gaps within the global marketing functions for the entire enterprise.

Led the development of Lead management strategy, initiated end-2-end marketing automation platform with campaign management, lead management and lead nurturing (integrating several enterprise systems and applications; including SiteCatalyst, Search Center, Impact-X, Genesis Data Warehousing and SalesForce.com) supporting Demand Generation and Lead Generation; with complex scoring, multi-touch nurture, profiling and targeted content.

Responsible for Operations, Release / Change Management, QA, maintenance of all websites (9 countries, portals, intranet and extranets), ownership of all digital marketing channels and digital marketing efforts, internal and external portals, email campaigns, SEO and development of marketing automation.

Driving more effective strategic planning, investment decisions, resource allocation and budgeting processes.

Leading the charge for marketing performance measurement processes, and success metrics.

Analyzing and providing best industry practices.

Director of Engineering

Shopzilla, Inc. - December 2006 - September 2009 (2 years 10 months)

Hands-on management of more than a dozen of Quality Assurance Engineering teams for the entire enterprise supporting 100% of company revenue. Took over for 2 directors and two dysfunctional large groups of 34 QA engineers, and unified, rebuilt from scratch a next generation QA team, consisting less than 40% of original size, while the engineering team at the enterprise grew more than 30%.

Reporting to VP of Engineering. Completely transformed QA, the perspective on QA at large and built a world class, high performance QA team that
is in front of the process, and participates in the full life cycle as a stake holder; with multiple automation frameworks for regression and performance and continuous build/continuous integration; in doing so largely influenced engineering and business development process across the enterprise at large.

(Agile / SCRUM, Linux, Windows, Sybase, Oracle, J2EE, .Net, Perl, SOA)

Senior Manager
December 2006 - December 2007 (1 year 1 month)

Hands-on management of Quality Assurance teams for 3 verticals (including 2 critical new initiatives and search marketing, consumer acquision operations), supporting more than 60% of company revenue. (Agile / SCRUM, Unix / Linux, Sybase, Oracle, Java / J2EE, Perl)

QA Lead

Yahoo! Inc.

QA Lead on the biggest project Yahoo ever undertook, namely, Project Panama for Yahoo Search Marketing.

Lead, managed, mentored a team of QA Engineers. (Hands-on lead close to 5000 test cases). Played a critical role in successfully delivering Panama to production.

Initiated, organized and lead QA Summit at Yahoo headquarters and introduced The Agile Tripod of Quality Assurance.

Developed and presented to Yahoo! YSM QA team a special lecture, titled 'How the Web Works from QA P.O.V.' In which covered fundamentals of client- server technologies, Web 2.0, and QA Role in Agile.

Developed Master QA Test Plans, and Release Plan Template for multiple QA teams.

Developed and lead the implementation of Automation Framework with multiple APIS, with integration to continous build and release process.

Pro-actively partnered with Product Managers and Engineering Managers.

Championed and participated in change-management process. Influenced seamless collaboration between multi-location teams.

Received L2 Security Clearence.

Release and QA Manager

Laureate Education Inc.

May 2002 - November 2005 (3 years 7 months)

Leading maintenance, release management and quality assurance of many high-volume websites, n-tier client/server enterprise applications, (multi- tier architecture) on Unix/Linux and Windows platforms. Serving multiple universities, involving course delivery, CRM, CMS, DBMS, integration frameworks, load balanced deployment and more.

Established, built and actively spear-head change management process in
IT and web and applications development accross the board. Introduced, developed and lead the efforts in establishing and adopting standards, dependency management, QA and testing, build, configuration and release management; including developing, evaluating, deploying tools and application suites and training, assisting team members; developing release strategies, functional, regression, load/stress and performance tests, white/black-box tests and more.

Performing key role in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance and helping organization overcome the pains of fast growth.

Sr. Systems Administrator
May 2002 - November 2005 (3 years 7 months)

Responsible for up-time & reliability of a multi-location large-scale NOC backend. Managing tens of Enterprise Unix Systems (Solaris 2.X & Linux). Helping bringing Unix and Windows environments work in a seamless fashion; contributing to a collaborative relationship between IT/IS and Web & Applications Development teams.

Putting in good use years of experience in UNIX and Shell, BIND, DNS, Apache, Sendmail, WU-IMAP, TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, SSH, GCC; security and rescue technologies and OSI model and networking fundamentals; TLS, VTL, Netbackup, NAS, NFS, RAID, clustering, fiber, SAN, vSAN, Veritas, EMC. Including active monitoring techniques for high availability and more...

Interviewing and participating in hiring process for Unix Administrators and release managers. Managing and training Unix administrators.

Developing disaster recovery, fault tolerance and backup strategies. Actively heading migration, integration and/or decommissioning of legacy applications and processes.

Lead Technologist

Fabric Interactive & Linkfinity - September 2001 - May 2003 (1 year 9 months)

Several websites, intranets, extranets, applications, content-management systems, digital media presentations. Business development, proposals, client pitches, developing cross-platform sites, information architecture, code libraries, templates, scopes, wireframes, presentations, researching and developing tools, developing style/implementation guides, Developing a plan for technology, building DM Tech Team and leading. Communicating with client, design and creative team and producers to meet requirements as

well as assist the process, define the roles and requirements and develop deliverables for various companies.

Served customers and led projects like: http://www.decore.com (CRM, CMS, IA), Daimler Chrysler (CMS, IA), SEGWAY (CMS, Extranet), Gallaudet University (Intranet, CMS)

Lead Design Technologist

Frog Design Inc.

Reporting to CTO. Responsible for building and leading Digital Media Technology team at the newly established Los Angeles office. (Operations stopped due to economical down-turn.)

Active participant to all technological aspects of projects, as well as project management as leading technologist.

Participating in business development, proposals, client pitches. Responsibility of DM Tech Team and leading. Communicating with client, design and creative team and producers to meet requirements as well as assist the process, define the roles and requirements and develop deliverables.

Olive Design
Lead Web Developer
August 1997 - August 1999 (2 years 1 month)

• Mastering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl
• Image/graphic and code optimization
• Scripting and cross platform web development
• E-commerce solutions, Online Marketing solutions
• Served clients and technical leadings on projects like: Garden.com, Pervasive Software (pervasive.com), RYKA Shoes (ryka.com), Karma International, and Hewlett Packard HP (Intranet).

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