Contact
- mehmet.duran@gmail.com
- Mobile
- +44 7503 388 345
- Website
- mehmetduran.co.uk
- linkedin.com/in/mehmetduran
- Location
- London, UK
Profile
Product-focused technical leader and senior engineer with 20+ years of experience building complex, large-scale products, including AI and Machine Learning services. Former CTO of two companies, combining deep engineering expertise with strong product vision, business awareness, stakeholder communication, and team leadership to turn user needs into clear technical direction and successful delivery.
Skills
Leadership Skills
- Product and technical strategy: defining clear direction aligned with user needs, business goals, delivery constraints, and stakeholder priorities.
- Cross-disciplinary leadership: leading product, design, research, content, delivery, engineering, clients, and senior stakeholders around shared outcomes.
- Team building: recruiting, mentoring, and developing high-performing local, remote, and distributed engineering teams.
- Delivery: running agile delivery, prioritisation, planning, and team ceremonies that keep teams focused and moving.
Technical Skills
- Product engineering and architecture: designing usable, production-grade software with robust APIs, testable architecture, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure.
- AI and automation: designing LLM-agnostic integration layers across Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini, with RAG, API-backed workflows, document extraction, observability, and monitoring.
- Full-stack engineering: modern JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Python, Django, Flask, web standards, and data visualisation.
- Accessibility: expert in accessibility testing, assistive technologies, WCAG, inclusive implementation, and automated testing.
Highlights
- At the Department for Education, brought together product, design, delivery, and engineering teams to deliver a major greenfield programme ahead of deadline, enrolling 95% of schools in England and Wales — 11,445 schools — within the first year.
- Led the architecture, design, and development of a GAN-based AI-assisted design tool for Adobe Illustrator, shortlisted in the Design category at Cannes Lions 2019.
- At GDS, created a rigorous framework for comparing automated accessibility testing tools, led research across 12 tools and published a report that remains widely cited.
- At Kanexa, took over an unfocused AI offering and misaligned product, bringing product strategy, technical clarity, and team alignment to turn it into a credible AI capability deployed at scale.
Experience
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Kanexa
Head of Artificial Intelligence
2024 – Present
- 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 Azure OpenAI demos for automated document data extraction, demonstrating how AI could streamline manual workflows and create new product capabilities.
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Fractional CTO and Product Technology Consultant
2022 – 2024
- Advised early-stage and growing startups across SaaS, hardware, gaming, art, and health tech on product strategy, technical direction, architecture, growth, and delivery.
- Ran strategy workshops, reviewed code and architecture, supported senior hiring, and helped teams establish strong engineering practices.
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- Led the Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development project, aligning product, design, delivery, and engineering on a £750m greenfield programme.
- Scaled the engineering team from 6 to 12 developers, adding testing capability and technical architecture leadership while defining the service architecture, delivery approach, CI/CD pipeline, and testing strategy.
- Enabled delivery ahead of deadline, enrolling 95% of schools in England and Wales — 11,445 schools — within the first year.
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- CTO across a real estate AI startup and creative technology agency, turning early-stage ideas into prototypes, investor demos, client pitches, and product work.
- Built and led a 9-person multidisciplinary team, establishing architecture, engineering standards, CI/CD, testing, delivery practices, and technical governance from scratch.
- Led AI product development across multiple iterations, including a real estate analysis engine and an AI-assisted Adobe Illustrator plugin shortlisted in the Design category at Cannes Lions 2019.
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- Was part of the GOV.UK Accessibility Team, improving accessibility practice across UK digital government and helping teams build services that worked better for everyone.
- Created accessibility testing infrastructure for GOV.UK front-end components, supporting work that later evolved into the GOV.UK Design System.
- Led a major research project comparing 10 automated accessibility testing tools, publishing findings that became a widely cited reference for accessibility practitioners and delivery teams.
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- Led the Home Office Digital Data and API team, setting technical direction for how services stored, structured, shared, and exposed critical data across a complex department.
- Defined API, data, and technical standards with 30+ delivery teams and cross-government partners, improving consistency, data sharing, and service interoperability.
- Built alignment across policy, delivery, technology, and service teams, turning ambiguous organisational needs into practical standards, guidance, and implementation support.
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- Ran an early AI and computer vision research project, prototyping photo-ranking algorithms across 1,000+ image sets and building a desktop tool to compare 12 approaches across face recognition, composition, quality signals, and photo-selection accuracy.
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- Senior full-stack developer at R/GA, working on high-profile projects for Nike, Burberry, Nokia, and Goldman Sachs.
- Contributed to Nike KitBuilder, winner of a Eurobest award, and designed the HTML and JavaScript framework for the Goldman Sachs website.
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Other roles
2004 – Present
- Too many great roles to fit here, such as Shazam, Microsoft, Ministry of Justice, Cabinet Office, Financial Times, Friday, Sapient, BT, Barclays, Lab49, and a fair few others. Full experience available on LinkedIn.
Education
Işık University, Istanbul – BSc. Computer Science