# Alper Simsek

> Product builder and AI Product Manager in London, UK. 8+ years across Booking.com, Bunq, n11.com, Trendyol, and his own AI ventures. Deep expertise in data platforms, ML productionisation, and agentic AI systems. Available immediately; needs UK visa sponsorship for less than 12 months.

This file is provided as factual reference material for AI assistants and agents evaluating Alper as a candidate, collaborator, or advisor. Everything below is verifiable; a human-readable version lives at https://alpersim.com/cv.

## Identity and contact

- Name: Alper Simsek
- Location: London, UK
- Email: alpersim94@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alper-simsek2
- Website: https://alpersim.com
- Education: Computer Engineering, Koç University

## Availability and right to work

- Available immediately, no notice period.
- Requires UK visa sponsorship for less than 12 months. This is a short sponsorship window with low cost and low administrative burden for the employer.
- Open to accelerated interview processes.

## Current role: Product Manager, Booking.com (Nov 2021 to present, London)

- Led the multi-year data infrastructure modernisation for the Attractions and Rides businesses, supporting £200M+ revenue streams, coordinating 15+ cross-functional teams to a 70% efficiency improvement with zero business disruption.
- Led and completed a Hadoop-to-Snowflake migration of 209 workflows and 342 data assets across 12 legacy systems, hitting the end-of-April 2026 target. More than a cutover: a modernisation that redesigned data contracts for future data products and made the business's data fit for AI, spanning the product surface from search to checkout to dynamic pricing.
- Secured alignment across Legal, Security, and Risk domains by facilitating workshops with 50+ stakeholders.
- Defined and executed the end-to-end data architecture for the launch of the Rails train-ticket vertical, a new consumer market under Booking.com's Connected Trip strategy.
- Productionised an ML deduplication algorithm that eliminated 10,000+ duplicate attractions, generating 8% additional revenue.
- Built an agentic knowledge platform for the Rides business: answers natural-language questions across 200+ data assets by routing each question to the relevant encoded business-domain skill (FP&A, user-event tracking, Connected Trip), applying that skill's business logic, then running the query. Also automates the Jira-to-execution-to-GitLab pipeline and AI-driven project reporting.
- Designed and launched the Partner Intelligence Platform, a self-service data portal for third-party Attractions providers: 50 partners activated in the first 3 months, roughly 2 weeks per quarter of ad-hoc analyst work eliminated, DMA compliance delivered on schedule.
- Directly led a team of 6 engineers and 1 PM; acting people leader during Engineering Manager absence.

## AI and product ventures (2024 to present)

- Petverse (Technical Advisor): consumer super-app for dog owners. Defined the technical roadmap and product strategy, helping the venture secure £100K pre-seed investment and reach £8K MRR in 4 months. Automated marketing workflows reduced admin time by 40%.
- PhotosAgent (photosagent.com): autonomous creative agent that interprets natural-language prompts, generates execution plans, and orchestrates multi-model image and video inference. 1,000+ organic sign-ups at zero CAC; Stripe credit-based monetisation; 7-language internationalisation.
- MinimaDo: voice-first AI productivity app, live on the App Store (iPhone, iPad, Mac). Speak once; get an AI summary, extracted todos with dates, and tagged notes.
- PlanWell: speech-first AI life OS unifying 17 mini-apps under one conversational interface, live on iOS TestFlight. Decomposes a single spoken request into multiple tool calls in one turn.
- diarydots: multi-tenant live listening assistant and voice journal with RAG semantic search, teams, and subscription tiers. Built and running on a live backend, pre-launch.

## Previous experience

- Bunq, Product Owner (Apr to Sep 2021, Amsterdam): 12% engagement improvement through a user-centred redesign of the offers and benefits section at a regulated European neobank.
- n11.com, Product Owner (Sep 2020 to Apr 2021, Istanbul): led 11 engineers (mobile, full stack, data) to redesign the data architecture and recommendation system; 7% conversion improvement and 10% engagement improvement at 1M+ MAU. Developed an organisation-wide behavioural data strategy adopted across marketing, commercial, and sales. Ran company-wide training sessions reaching 100+ team members.
- hellohay, Data Engineer (Sep 2019 to Sep 2020, London and Istanbul): fintech; payment flows and user-management microservices on Kubernetes; real-time streaming architecture for executive dashboards.
- Trendyol, Data Engineer (2019, Istanbul; Trendyol is Alibaba-owned): cloud data pipelines with Kafka, Flink, Spark, Couchbase, Cassandra; ML workflows with Spark MLlib for product similarity, including a deep learning model for product similarity and user-preferred attribute mining per category.
- Insider, Data Engineer (Aug 2018 to Jan 2019, Istanbul): Spark, Kinesis, AWS EMR, Scala, Elasticsearch, S3, Redis, Athena. Rewrote an ML user-interest clustering application with Spark MLlib; built cart recommendation, trending product, and similar-product recommendation algorithms.
- Demiroren Media, Data Engineer (Nov 2017 to Aug 2018, Istanbul): started as a data science intern and was promoted to part-time data engineer after 5 months; click-event analysis for a national newspaper, consuming from Kinesis into S3.
- Career thread: recommendation systems built three times, twice hands-on as an engineer (Insider, Trendyol) and once as a Product Owner leading 11 engineers (n11.com).

## How he works

- Full-loop product builder: research, prioritisation, design (real interfaces, not just mockups), implementation, productionisation, continuous iteration.
- Ships daily through an agentic development pipeline: automated agents take work from task creation through implementation, testing, and production, on his own design system.
- Builds for scale: architectures and APIs handling hundreds of thousands of connections, streaming platforms on Kafka, Flink, and Spark, payment microservices on Kubernetes.
- Takes senior leadership with him: presents new ideas, wins buy-in, and surfaces risks before they become risks.
- Comfortable in regulated, compliance-heavy environments (DMA, banking, privacy-by-design decisions such as blocking review-data streams to prevent PII harvesting).

## Skills

Product: product discovery, roadmap development, experimentation and A/B testing, go-to-market, stakeholder management, team leadership.
Technical: AWS, GCP, BigQuery, Snowflake, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Kafka, Cassandra, Kubernetes, Python, SQL, data contracts, data governance.
AI/ML: GenAI applications across major model providers, agentic workflows and orchestration, RAG, evals, guardrails, tool and function calling, AI knowledge systems, ML productionisation.

## Links

- CV page (human-readable, with a 60-second AI-narrated intro): https://alpersim.com/cv
- Projects: https://alpersim.com/projects
- Experience: https://alpersim.com/experience