ømerburakpolat

Ömer Burak Polat

Design Engineer — Senior Product Designer

I'm a design engineer in Amsterdam. I turn ambiguous problems into something clickable in days, build the tooling that makes that repeatable, and teach teams to do it themselves.

ømerburakpolat
Amsterdam NL

experience

experience : Role[]01 / 06
    • Initiated a company mission from unsolicited strategy through to build, reframed a monetization problem as a structural distribution problem, took it to the management team, then led delivery as design engineer.
    • Built and published an AI-operable design system organization-wide, plus AI artifacts that let teams decide fast.
    • Designed and ran 'Idea to Prototype', a two-part L&D series teaching AI-assisted prototyping, plus the prompt libraries, templates and workflows behind it.
    • Built the mission's knowledge architecture: an agent-maintained second brain with scheduled cross-team dependency tracking across multiple sources.
    • Shipped production frontend. Built flows that take a ticket to a PR with full-stack context across multiple repos.

    on this site Course CompanionDesign System for AI PrototypingIdea to PrototypeSelf-Maintaining Knowledge VaultFrontend Shipping Guide

    • Sole designer on an IoT-based SaaS platform for asset management across desktop and mobile.
    • Created Catamaran, the company's first design system.
    • Designed Sensei, an IoT environmental monitoring product.
    • Drove adoption of squad structure and agile process across product development.

    on this site LighthouseBorda Sensei

    • Sole designer on a guitar FX pedal simulation app, native iOS and Android.
    • Led design for a companion product for social sharing of guitar tones.

    on this site Solo

education

education : Education[]02 / 06
  • Middle East Technical University

    Master of Architecture

    Ankara, TR · 2010—2014

  • İzmir University of Economics

    Bachelor of Architecture

    İzmir, TR · 2005—2009

tools

tools : Tool[]03 / 06

Hand

made directly
  • Figma — Design systems, product design, L&D material.
  • Cinema 4D — Product renders and animated ads.
  • Adobe Suite — Photo manipulation, color grading, vector drawing, typesetting and print.
  • Final Cut — Basic videography.
  • Rive — Interaction and motion.

Directed

specified, judged, corrected
  • Next.js · React · TypeScript — Reads, debugs and ships production code. Writes it with AI.

Operated

run as systems
  • Claude / Claude Code — Primary build surface. Design systems, skills, agent workflows.
  • Cursor — Production frontend and rebuilt prototypes.

Shipped on

languages

languages : Language[]04 / 06
  • TurkishNative
  • EnglishC2
  • DutchA2

freelance

booking : Booking05 / 06

The meeting is a first consultation. I build prototypes, POCs and production-quality code, so whether you have an idea you want to see visualized or something ready to deploy, I can help. I also consult with teams on AI and L&D.

 

Book 30 minutes (opens in a new tab)30 min · Cal Video

colophon

colophon : string[]06 / 06

I created the spec and the phased build plan by researching the problem, collecting benchmarks, sketching in Figma and pulling context out of a second brain I built. I crafted and honed it with reference documents, long planning and my own reading of what the model gave back, before any of it became code. An agent wrote the code. Deciding what was wrong is the last step, not the job.

The spec lives at the root of the repo as CLAUDE.md. Tokens down to the hex, component contracts, a phase list where nothing starts until the previous thing passes its check. It took longer to write than the first few pages took to build, which sounds like bad maths until you've watched an agent confidently invent a component library nobody asked for. The specificity is the job. Vague instructions still get you vague software, just faster than before.

The method is the one I teach: stream, structure, guide, build. Dump everything, let a model turn the mess into a brief, argue with the brief until it's small enough to be true, then build one testable thing at a time. So the four-phase workshop on the enablement page isn't a retrofit. It's what produced this site. The palette you're looking at is the second one, incidentally. The first was monochrome and sharp-cornered and I liked it right up until I put it next to something warm.

An avatar of Ömer: headphones, dark glasses, a patterned cloak and an armoured arm, in a neon city at night.

The CV comes in two versions, one for each title. Same roles and dates, different emphasis.

Design Engineer CV (PDF)Sr. Product Designer CV (PDF)

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