Deniz Kusefoglu

I’m an infrastructure engineer with experience building, maintaining, and optimizing internet-scale distributed systems under heavy load with high availability requirements. I believe that building a thriving team is the best way to deliver results and ship the right thing fast in a hypergrowth environment. I’ve worked as a Manager and as an IC, and I’m looking to work as an IC in my next role.

denizkusef@gmail.com / LinkedIn / GitHub

💻 Experience

Engineering Manager - Edge Metadata Team @ Vercel (January 2023 - January 2024)

• Led an infrastructure migration project on the hotpath of every request to Vercel. Reduced the cost of metadata storage four fold while halving p50 and p99 latencies.
• Delivered a multi-quarter project successfully and on time as the manager of a previously struggling team.
• Drove difficult cost/latency tradeoff decisions by identifying clear metrics and running lean experiments. Represented our strategy and team to leadership.
• Led quarterly planning and prioritization cycles.
• Trained interviewers on a new hiring pipeline and successfully hired one new infrastructure engineer.
  

Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure Team @ Vercel (October 2021 - January 2023)

• Developed and managed a Global Content Delivery Network responsible for serving on the order of 150K requests per second for many of the world’s most well known brands.
• Broke out core features of our system from a monolith to microservices in Go, allowing us to horizontally scale resources for previously bottlenecked workloads and improving latencies while keeping costs in check.
• Lowered our time to first byte p50 latencies by a quarter and p99 latencies four-fold by collecting the right metrics and driving architecture optimizations across the stack.
• Solved dozens of incidents on the front line as Vercel’s incoming request volume scaled 10x. Drove post-incident response to find big picture solutions and lower our incident rate.
• Reduced developer time required for deployment release cycles by improving the reliability of tests and automating key parts of the deployment process. This project allowed our team to ship code many times a day with confidence and drastically improved iteration velocity.
• Mentored and upleveled junior engineers, created onboarding resources.

Keywords: Lua, Nginx, Go, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Infrastructure at the Edge, DynamoDB, CosmosDB.

Senior Software Engineer - Infrastructure Team @ InfluxData (Sept 2017 - October 2021)

• InfluxData maintains the InfluxDB Cloud Platform and open source time-series database.
• Created software deployment pipelines for product engineers in our multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) multi-region Kubernetes clusters.
• Designed and built a new serverless InfluxDB query product, working closely with product team and customers to iterate on user experience and implementation
• Eliminated feature drift between services by automating the end-to-end API contract testing framework for our CI/CD pipeline.
• Built services in Go to server our APIs for the new InfluxDB Cloud Platform product.
• Developed the open-source data visualization and UI platform Chronograf on the frontend team.
• Specced, designed and built major product features such as ‘sample data’ which allowed users to demo our product, and ‘templates’, for import and export-able resources within our product.
• Implemented the Language Server Protocol (LSP) server for InfluxDB’s data scripting and query language flux.
• Presented new product features at InfluxDays SF 2019 Monitoring & Alerting with InfluxDB 2.0

Keywords Go, Kubernetes, kind, openAPI, ArgoCD, Jsonnet, React, TypeScript

🎓 Education

• Recurse Center Self-directed learning retreat building web applications and backends to support side projects.
  The Recurse Center - New York, New York (Oct 2016 - January 2017)
  
  
• MSc in Neuroscience Created a map of neuronal connections of the mouse brain at unprecedented scale. Built a computational image analysis pipeline and developed novel tissue preparation and imaging techniques
  Howard Hughes Medical Center - Ashburn, Virginia (Sept 2009 - June 2013)
  
  
• BSc in Mathematics Mathematics and Computational Biology
  The University of Chicago - Chicago, Illinois (Sept 2001 - June 2006)
  

📃 Research Publications

• Long-range neuronal circuits underlying the interactions between sensory and motor cortex, Tianyi Mao, Deniz Küsefoğlu, Bryan M. Hooks, Daniel Huber, Leopoldo Petreanu, Karel Svoboda, NEURON, Volume 72, Issue 1, 6 October 2011, pages 111-123
• A comprehensive thalamocortical projection map at the mesoscopic level, Barbara J. Hunnicutt, Brian R. Long, Deniz Küsefoğlu, Katrina J Gertz, Haining Zhong, Tianyi Mao, NATURE NEUROSCIENCE, Volume 17, Issue 9, 3 August 2014, pages 1276-1285L