Looking for a product to get stuck into, and work at scale, where technology solves a human problem. I want to resolve the politics, management and technical side together: reconciling the user needs, business priorities and what is honestly achievable with technology. I want to grow and build the team with the product, because they shape each other.

Mehmet Duran
@mehmetduran
Product-focused technical leader and senior engineer with 20+ years of experience building complex, large-scale products.
What I'm looking for
At Kanexa, I built the AI function from scratch, defining strategy and product opportunities while leading a natural-language interface that turns user queries into structured API calls for accurate, reproducible answers.
Across 20+ years, I've led engineering, architecture, and product delivery for Mortar, Faction, the Department for Education, and government teams. I've built AI engines, grew delivery teams from 6 to 12 developers, and helped enrol 11,445 schools in England and Wales within a year.
Experience
Work history, roles, and key accomplishments
AI Tech Lead
Kanexa
Apr 2024 - Present (2 years 7 months)
- Built the new AI function from scratch as Head of AI, defining the strategy, identifying product opportunities, and aligning product and technology leads around practical, high-value AI use cases.
- Led the development of a natural language interface that converted user queries into structured API calls, enabling accurate, reproducible answers instead of opaque generative responses.
- Developed
Director
Stack Smasher
Jan 2012 - Present (14 years 10 months)
Software consultant working on a range of long-term engagements
- Worked with a number startups on an ongoing basis, providing consultancy on product, software design and growth
- Mid-sized teams up to 50, working on SaaS, hardware, gaming, art and health tech products
- Ran workshops and collaborated on strategy documents, ran interviews and helped with recruitment
- Reviewed and designed softwa
- Built a data visualisation for journal editors as part of the content acquistion team
- Engaged with the wider front-end community for establishing the design system
Lead Developer
Department for Education
Nov 2020 - May 2021 (6 months)
- Team lead for Teachers Continuing Professional Development project
- Grew a team of developers from 6 to 12 developers, 1 tester and hired a Technical Architect
- Worked on technical architecture, planning and service design of the programme
- Established the development environment, best practices, development life cycle, pipeline, and testing
- Engaged with the wider Technical Architecture com
Chief Technology Officer
Mortar
Apr 2019 - Sep 2020 (1 year 5 months)
- CTO of Mortar, a data analysis and AI startup for the real estate sector.
- I oversaw the design and development of an AI engine with a team of developers, and implemented it on client projects and demos.
- Worked on planning, writing business plans and cases, meeting with investors, applying to grants, stakeholder management and everything else you need to do as a co–founder.
Chief Technology Officer
Faction
Dec 2018 - Sep 2020 (1 year 9 months)
- CTO of a creative technology agency
- Responsible for a team of developers and designers all working remotely
- Responsible for pitching, client and stakeholder management, writing proposals and designing technical solutions for client projects.
- Co-built and ran a team of remote developers.
- Shortlisted on Cannes 2019 Golden Lions in Design category.
- Fixed issues around usability and accessibility on the Ethnicity Facts and Figures website
- Added features to the static site generator
- Worked in the FT.com team and developed features for the FT website and their enterprise tools.
- Worked on an automated accessibility testing procedure and documented it, and generally helped with solving accessibility issues across the team.
- Worked in the Origami team on the o-table component to fix sorting on tables.
Developer, Accessibility Team
Government Digital Service
Jun 2016 - Feb 2017 (8 months)
- Developer in the Accessibility Team, which was responsible for the whole of GOV.UK’s accessibility
- Responsible for helping with user research, developing tools to help other developers, help with audits, answer questions, give talks and participate in the community building efforts of the team
- Worked on a large research project and published our findings on automated accessibility testing to
Tech Lead
UK Home Office
Sep 2015 - Apr 2016 (7 months)
- Tech Lead for the Data and API team
- Respondible for technical standards, API and data standards
- Responsible for reviewing API designs and consulting for other teams
- Designed and lead the development of the Data Catalogue
- Technical and security design for the PNC airwaves API
- Ran the discovery for Life Events Verification
- Also head of accessibility for the developers
- Worked on Court Finder, the ruby on rails version, and worked on rewriting it in Python/Django
- Worked on migrating Court Finder data to the new platform
- Front-end developer at People Finder and Tribunal Decisions Database
Worked on-site with the BT team at BT Centre to deliver the next phase of their customer facing product management platform.
- Ran a computer vision research at Photobox, developed an algorithm and a test tool that tries to determine the best photos in a given set of images
- Implemented a lot of ideas I gathered from academic papers such as histogram analysis and temporal grouping
- Using OpenCV on Python implemented many of the algorithms including face recognition
- Wrote a testing tool on wxPython for desktop use
-
Frontend Developer
Friday
Feb 2013 - Jun 2013 (4 months)
- Helped create the OOCSS-style modular CSS classes that were used in the new Co-operative funeral care website.
- Worked on a map visualisation tool for HSBC’s Global Connections website using d3.js and underscore.js.
Frontend Developer
Lab49
Nov 2012 - Feb 2013 (3 months)
Worked on Lab49’s custom MVC framework for financial clients.
jQuery, underscore.js, Require.js, Nirvana SASS.
Software Engineer
Intent HQ | FT1000 fastest growing European business
Jun 2012 - Jul 2012 (1 month)
Worked as Software Engineer at Intent HQ | FT1000 fastest growing European business.
Software Engineer
Axon Active AG
Jan 2012 - Apr 2012 (3 months)
Worked on the development of the front-end of Axon Active's data visualisation product, using Spring Framework, Thymeleaf, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
Web Developer
Shazam Entertainment
Nov 2011 - Dec 2011 (1 month)
Worked with head of software to create a new node.js based web back-end, including testing and front-end.
During my time at R/GA London, I worked on almost every project that needed open standards development. I've pretty much built most of the projects from the ground up, designed the systems, done the back-end mostly in PHP, front-end HTML/CSS/JavaScript, many times all by myself.
- Back-end and front-end maintenance of the Now Playing website for Nokia using the WordPress platform.
- Back-end deve
Education
Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework
Işık Üniversitesi
BSc, Computer Science and Engineering
2000 - 2004
Tech stack
Software and tools used professionally
Availability
Location
Authorized to work in
Website
mehmetduran.co.ukSalary expectations
Social media
Job categories
Skills
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