How I ended up where marketing meets engineering

The short version is on the homepage. This is the longer one: how someone who started in English Literature ended up running paid-media budgets and writing the SQL and pipelines underneath them.

I didn't start in marketing

I studied English Literature at Istanbul University, and my first real job was teaching English. That sounds like a detour from growth marketing, but it's where I learned the thing I still rely on most: how to take something complicated and make it land for someone who doesn't live inside it. A lot of marketing, and almost all of analytics, is exactly that. The dashboards and models only matter if a decision-maker actually understands them.

Falling into data

My first step toward what I do now was a season as a data analyst at ALARA AGRI, making sense of lab data and building small processes to clean it up. It was unglamorous, and I loved it. Turning messy raw data into something a human could act on felt like the same skill as teaching, just with numbers instead of grammar. So I leaned in: I did an MSc in International Marketing & Business Development at Marmara University and taught myself the technical side, Python, SQL, and the analytics stack, in parallel.

Learning growth in the deep end

At Sosyopix, an e-commerce brand, I ran performance campaigns across Google, Meta, and Criteo, and built the Power BI and Looker dashboards that turned commerce data into decisions. That's where the two halves of my work fused: I wasn't just running the ads, I was building the measurement that told us whether they worked. Once you've done both, you can't un-see how often campaigns fail not because the creative is bad, but because the tracking underneath them is broken.

PayTR: budgets, retention, and a platform I didn't plan to build

At PayTR, a fintech, the scope got bigger. I took on a €1.5M+ annual paid-media budget and grew the active merchant base 65%+ while cutting acquisition cost 30%+. But the work I'm proudest of started as a throwaway request: someone asked me for a SWOT of customer feedback. Instead of a slide, I built Voice of Customer, an AI platform that reads 50K+ posts about us and nine competitors and turns them into briefings leadership reads at board level. That pattern, spotting a problem between teams and building the system that solves it, is really what I do.

Building my own thing

Alongside all of this I founded Verintra in 2022, my own consultancy. It began by supporting small and mid-sized businesses and grew, over the years, into consultancy and ad management for larger companies too. Running it fed my entrepreneurial side and gave me hands-on experience across very different sectors. It's also where I'm building Verintra Feed Optimizer, a product-feed SaaS launching in 2026. Building a product end to end, design, frontend, backend, billing, made me a sharper marketer: I now understand the engineering reality behind every feed, pixel, and integration a growth team leans on.

Why Berlin

Moving to Berlin was a deliberate new chapter, professionally and personally. I wanted to take everything I'd learned and apply it inside companies that operate at global scale, in one of Europe's most dynamic markets. I've made Berlin home for the long run, and I'm a permanent resident with full, unrestricted work authorization. I'm looking for a Growth Marketing role here where I can do what I do best: run the campaigns and build the measurement and automation underneath them, in the same seat. If that sounds like a gap on your team, I'd love to talk.