journalist → engineer
Backend and LLM-systems engineer, Python-first (FastAPI, LangGraph, Gemini, RAG) with Node and TypeScript on the side. Before the code: eight years as a fixer and investigative reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Financial Times, and the Guardian, plus four years of Amnesty trial observation. In 2023 I started shipping data-engineering for human-rights organisations; now I build backend systems, LLM agents, and journalism tooling.
Remote · EU / UK / US timezones · /hire · /for-journalism
Two careers that met in late 2023. Journalism and human-rights work (top), engineering (bottom), bridged by a personal judicial-data project (BitzeOOP) that EuroMed Rights later picked up as a contract.
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Config-driven, resumable Python pipeline ingesting from Hugging Face, Kaggle, GitHub, direct image URLs, and scraped PDFs into a single HuggingFace Arrow dataset. Deterministic sampler allocates toward a 10M-sample target; state machine, single-instance locks, AWS EC2/S3 execution. ~295 commits.
Python · HuggingFace datasets · Scrapy · pdf2image · AWS
Backend for an AI-powered Chrome extension using Gemini Live. Deterministic state machine, approval-first trust model, immutable action contracts, idempotent execution. Frozen architectural contracts with versioned change requirements. ~177 commits.
Python · FastAPI · Gemini Live · Pydantic
15+ microservices on Google Cloud Run. 80+ live data sources, multi-layer caching (Redis → MongoDB), Node.js WebSocket streaming, LangGraph reflection workflows, a 5-provider LLM router with retries and backoff.
Python · Node.js · Cloud Run · Redis · MongoDB · LangGraph
Autonomous crypto newsroom — discovers stories, writes articles in 5 distinct editorial voices, and ships them with cover art and audio digests, all without a human in the loop. 3-service pipeline: dual-discovery news fetch (Gemini Grounded + Perplexity Sonar), SHA256 + embedding dedup, 5-persona LangGraph generator gated by a Pydantic contract, Vertex AI imagery + Google TTS studio. Scheduled via Cloud Scheduler.
FastAPI · MongoDB Atlas · LangGraph · Vertex AI
Semi-autonomous smart-contract vulnerability auditor — Solidity, Rust, and C++. Python orchestrating Foundry + Halmos formal verification + Solodit and BlockThreat intel on EVM, with Rust and C++ contract coverage as well. Mermaid diagram output and structured reports.
Python · Foundry · Halmos · Solodit (EVM) · Rust + C++ contract analysis
Turkish Grand National Assembly observation pipeline reading the daily parliamentary record (tutanak). Scrapy with Puppeteer middleware; ~68 commits. Successor to the Dec 2021 MPs performance-stats scraper — same target, larger scope.
Python · Scrapy · Puppeteer
60K+ Turkish judicial appointments across 13 years, normalized from messy PDF/CSV sources into person-level career histories. Neo4j graph for people/posts/appointments/locations, transition and anomaly analyses. Informed 2 EuroMed Rights investigative reports — the bridge piece between journalism and engineering.
Python · Neo4j · Pandas · PDF parsing
The first coding project after the journalism pivot. Scraper extracting question proposals, research proposals, parliamentary questions, and MP resumes from the Turkish parliament website, plus an analytics layer calculating performance metrics for MPs and political parties. Later commercialized.
Python · Scrapy
The beauty is not only in the end result of the net, but also in the crazy dance of spider, in netting potentially, crawling and dancing.
Before the engineering work, and alongside it. Investigative reporting, human-rights observation, and civil-society organising through the 2010s and early 2020s.
Contract that grew out of my personal BitzeOOP judicial-appointments project. After roughly 700 hours of solo work on the pipeline, EuroMed Rights picked it up and commissioned deliverables that informed two published investigative reports on judicial independence. The bridge between journalism and engineering is the personal project itself — this contract was the first external pickup of it.
Four years attending and reporting on court hearings involving free speech, press freedom, and impunity. Detailed reports, lawyer liaison, published explanatory articles, and internal-magazine pieces on court architecture and the principle of publicity.
1 of 4 scholarship winners. Investigated Istanbul’s taxi industry through 50+ FOI requests to 8 state institutions. Findings published in T24 (May 2021) and featured in a YouTube documentary.
News projects for English, German, Dutch, and Italian outlets across Turkey and the Middle East. Contributor to De autoritaire verleiding (Casper Thomas, 2018) — research on authoritarian regimes in Turkey, Russia, Hungary, India, and Trumpian USA.
Reports to Cairo HQ on political, economic, social, and cultural developments. Arranged interviews through coup, post-terror, and state-of-emergency conditions — including detainment experiences. Served the Cairo, Jerusalem, Tehran, and Rome offices; scheduled meetings for a biographical project on the Turkish president.