# Deniz Kara

> Staff Software Engineer

Location: Mountain View, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/denizkara

• Leading Software Engineer with deep expertise in high-scale distributed systems, risk/fraud infrastructure, and ML platform architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional vision, define technical strategy, mentor teams, and deliver multi-million dollar business impact (cost savings, fraud loss reduction).
• Specialized in ultra-high throughput streaming systems (peaking over 20 Trillion events/day) and complex infrastructure modernization.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2021 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States

### Principal Software Engineer @ PlayStation
Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Greater San Diego Area
• Architected a distributed Real-Time Fraud Prevention Platform (Lambda architecture) on AWS (Kinesis, Glue, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB), designing a custom data aggregation and feature serving framework for ML models. Built a team and led the development across multiple organizations, launching ahead of schedule. Saved the company millions of dollars by replacing a third-party solution with this new system. Reduced E2E latency by 90%, increased risk approval rates by 3% without increasing loss rates, and improved customer experience through reduced false positives.
• Spearheaded the creation of an ML-driven Smart Routing system, architecting a Contextual Bandit model with Continual Learning to optimize payment gateway selection. Built and mentored the team to develop the end-to-end training and serving pipelines on AWS SageMaker, resulting in a significant lift in revenue capture.
• Modernized the legacy monolithic payments system by designing a new microservices architecture, leading the adoption of microservices design principles across the organization and driving execution across multiple teams. Led the development in Java/Spring, AWS EC2, DynamoDB, and SQS. Reduced time-to-market for new features by 80%, increased code maintainability, and improved release cycles.
• Designed and developed a general-purpose Distributed Transaction Orchestrator (Saga Pattern) to manage eventually-consistent business workflows. Led multiple teams for its adoption throughout the organization, standardizing critical data consistency patterns and eliminating significant engineering overhead for complex transactions.
• Partnered with cross-functional Data Science teams to develop and operationalize ML solutions for high-value business problems, including Game Recommendation (Collaborative Filtering), IT Cluster Monitoring (Time-Series/ARIMA), and User Spending Behavior prediction.

### Principal Engineer @ Verizon
Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Greater San Diego Area
• Architected and led the development of the ThingSpace IoT platform for connectivity management and analytics, supporting billions of devices and massive data volumes across multi-data center deployments (thingspace.verizon.com).
• Designed the microservices architecture and set the technical direction for Reporting REST APIs. Led multiple project teams in development using Java, Spark, Scala, Kafka, and S3, deploying via Docker containers on Apache Marathon/Mesos with elastic HAProxy load balancing.
• Designed complex NoSQL (Cassandra) data models, defining partitioning and replication strategies to optimize storage, retrieval, and write-throughput for big data.
• Architected and developed Unified Web Services (SOAP APIs) enabling application developers to manage large-scale M2M/IoT device connectivity on the Verizon Wireless network (m2mdeveloper.verizon.com).

### Senior Software Architect @ PrintingForLess.com
Jan 2002 – Jan 2015 | Livingston, MT (Working remotely from San Diego, CA since 2008)
• Architected and led the development of highly scalable n-tier applications (CRM, ERP, web/e-commerce) that automated business processes and dramatically improved internal efficiencies.
• Defined technology roadmaps, established coding standards, and led the development of business automation systems using SQL Server, .NET, and C#.

### Software Engineer @ eFunds
Jan 2000 – Jan 2002 | Bothell, WA
• Designed and developed the WebEFT application, enabling electronic funds transfers over the web for collections/disbursements of funds.
• Implemented secure audit/trail and password encryption functionality using Visual C++, MFC, and CryptoAPI.

### Software Engineer @ Pamukbank
Jan 1998 – Jan 2000
• Designed and developed CICS-based serial communication and database applications for POS systems, specializing in credit card transaction processing (COBOL and DB2).

### Software Engineer @ Logo Business Solutions
Jan 1997 – Jan 1998
• Designed and delivered MRP (Material Requirements Planning) module for the company's flagship ERP software.


## Education
### Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in Business Administration
Boğaziçi University

### Bachelor's Degree in Department of Computer Engineering
Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi / Middle East Technical University

### High School in Science
Ankara Science High School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dkara

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Source: https://flows.cv/denizkara
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/denizkara/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12