Ahmet Halit
Ünsal
Software Manager & Full-Cycle Product Architect.
Engineering leader with 15+ years spanning safety-critical embedded systems, large-scale team management, and full-cycle product development. Directed a 30-engineer organization delivering ISO 26262-compliant software for EV powertrains at production scale, while concurrently architecting and operating two independent ventures from zero to production — a clinical-grade mobile application and a 24/7 live-capital algorithmic trading system. Equally fluent in organizational design, control algorithm development, React Native product engineering, and quantitative portfolio management. Known for owning outcomes end-to-end: root-causing production failures, shipping structural fixes, and building systems that harden against recurrence.
Independent Ventures
Products conceived, architected, built, and operated entirely as solo ventures. Every product, business, infrastructure, and operational decision is owned by me.
Project AURA
Automated Unbiased Return Algo — a production-grade, 24/7 algorithmic trading system running live capital on Binance Spot, deployed on a self-hosted ARM64 edge node.
I am simultaneously the system architect, the SRE, and the portfolio manager with full P&L responsibility.
What I Built
- Synchronous execution engine — a deliberate design choice: the system is I/O-bounded by exchange rate limits, so a single-threaded,
time.sleep()-paced loop yields a strictly auditable trace and one source of truth for portfolio state. - 4-stage walk-forward optimizer (successive-halving, ETA=3) that tunes selector, regime, and risk parameters against rolling historical windows and scores on a
(wins, sharpe, excess, aura)tuple to favor generalization over single-window overfit. - SQLite-backed persistence across events, intents, orders, snapshots, and heartbeats — every boot reconciles unacknowledged fills against the exchange, recovers entry prices, and rehydrates kill-switch state before the first trade.
- Multi-provider market-data layer (Binance Vision → Tiingo → Polygon → Alpha Vantage → yfinance → CoinGecko) with per-symbol Parquet caching, cutting cascade failures and accelerating backtests by orders of magnitude.
- Sync-failure guard on the broker reconciliation path — transient empty position sets are flagged as suspect instead of wiping in-memory state, eliminating a class of phantom kill-switch trips.
Portfolio Management
- Operate a multi-asset crypto universe: a high-liquidity anchor (BTC, ETH, BNB, XRP) plus a dynamic momentum-screened tail ranked on multi-horizon return, Sharpe, drawdown depth, and SMA-200 trend filters.
- Multi-layer risk stack: per-position stop-loss/take-profit with persistent entry-price recovery, a rolling-loss kill-switch, a portfolio-level cost-benefit gate, and an overlap gate that suppresses uneconomical turnover.
- Regime-aware defensive overlay routes a configurable fraction of capital into PAXG (tokenized gold) in SIDEWAYS/BEAR regimes.
- Root-caused every live incident — phantom kill-switch trips, lost fill callbacks, broker timestamp drift — and merged structural fixes back with permanent diagnostic logging.
Deployment
Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM64, Ubuntu/Debian), two systemd services with journalctl observability and Telegram notifications on every order, regime change, and kill-switch event. ~15 W steady-state, no cloud dependency, live 24/7.
Stack: Python 3, pandas, NumPy, CCXT, SQLite, systemd, Binance Spot REST/WebSocket, custom walk-forward engine.
Professional Experience
15+ years of driving engineering excellence.
Software Manager | NISO TECHNOLOGY CO
May 2021 – Present | Izmir, TR
Directed a multidisciplinary engineering organization of 30 software engineers across 4 team leads, delivering mission-critical embedded software for EV powertrain systems including ECUs, traction inverters, and on-board chargers (OBCs).
- Scaled organizational capability by establishing a team-lead layer, defining ownership boundaries, and running structured performance reviews and mentorship programs — reducing manager single points of failure and enabling parallel delivery across subsystems.
- Enforced ISO 26262 and SPICE compliance across BSW and ASW layers developed on FreeRTOS and other RTOS platforms, ensuring functional safety traceability from requirements through integration.
- Deployed CI/CD pipelines and automated tooling that compressed release cycle times and shifted regression detection left, reducing late-stage integration failures.
- Led UN R155/R156 cybersecurity standard implementation activities, aligning software development processes with vehicle cybersecurity management system (CSMS) requirements.
- Designed and deployed C-based middleware solutions for high-reliability embedded applications, and contributed directly to diagnostic and safety-critical algorithms for powertrain systems.
- Instituted Git-based version control strategies with branching policies that enforced traceability and streamlined cross-team collaboration across a large, concurrent codebase.
- Drove data-driven project management by deploying analytics tooling to surface velocity, defect density, and milestone risk metrics to stakeholders.
- Managed resource allocation and risk mitigation across competing program milestones, acting as the primary interface between software, hardware, and systems engineering teams.
Team Leader | ECEMTAG
November 2017 – May 2021 | Istanbul, TR
Led design and validation of model-based control algorithms for ECUs and TCUs across automotive and defense programs.
- Introduced automated testing frameworks and HIL simulation environments that raised software verification coverage and reduced physical prototype dependency.
- Developed safety and redundancy functions in compliance with military standards, coordinating requirements directly with defense customers.
- Acted as cross-functional integration lead, aligning software and hardware milestones across embedded, systems, and validation teams using JIRA-based program tracking.
- Contributed to E/E architecture process development and rollout, including tool qualification and development workflow standardization.
Lead Researcher | TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey)
December 2016 – November 2017 | Kocaeli, TR
- Directed automotive and defense research programs focused on advanced control systems and diagnostics.
- Developed a product-level tool for data dictionary generation, calibration, and MiL (Model-in-Loop) testing, accelerating algorithm validation workflows.
- Characterized IPMSM performance in motoring and regenerative modes on a dynamometer test bench.
Senior Systems Engineer | TUMOSAN
January 2016 – December 2016 | Istanbul, TR
- Developed automatic shift-selection logic using Simulink Stateflow for a hybrid drivetrain platform.
- Designed traction control algorithms for slip-slide protection under variable surface conditions.
- Optimized fuel consumption and battery usage profiles using multi-objective cost functions.
Systems Engineer | METRO CO
February 2013 – January 2016 | Kocaeli, TR
- Built a longitudinal vehicle model and derived drivetrain power and torque requirements from first principles.
- Developed a full PMSM driver including Maximum Torque Per Ampere (MTPA) and flux-weakening control algorithms.
- Automated PID tuning via phase and gain margin calculation, and conducted HIL validation using dSpace MABX-I.
Researcher | Iowa State University — Bio-Electric Laboratory
February 2011 – January 2013 | Ames, IA
- Supervised advanced research on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electric field modeling.
- Instructed electric machines coursework to sophomore engineering students.
Education
MSc, Advanced Control Theory | Istanbul Technical University | 2014 – 2016
BSc, Electrical & Computer Engineering | Iowa State University | 2007 – 2011
Skills
A consolidated view of the technologies, standards, and methodologies I operate across — from safety-critical embedded systems to full-cycle product engineering.
Technical Toolbox
| Domain | Technologies & Standards |
|---|---|
| Embedded & Automotive | C/C++, FreeRTOS, AUTOSAR BSW/ASW, ISO 26262 (ASIL), SPICE, CAN/LIN/Ethernet, MATLAB/Simulink, Stateflow, Lauterbach Trace32, dSpace MABX |
| Control Systems | PMSM/IPMSM motor control, MTPA, flux weakening, PID synthesis, traction control, powertrain state machines, HIL/MiL simulation |
| Product Engineering | React Native (Expo SDK 54), TypeScript, TanStack Query v5, Supabase (Postgres + RLS + Edge Functions), Vite, React 19, NativeWind, Expo Router, EAS Build/Submit |
| Backend & Infrastructure | PostgreSQL, Row-Level Security, Deno Edge Functions, Resend, SQLite, systemd, journalctl, CCXT, Binance Spot REST/WebSocket |
| Quantitative / Algo | Python 3 (synchronous), pandas, NumPy, walk-forward optimization, regime detection, multi-layer risk management, Sharpe/drawdown-based scoring |
| Engineering Operations | Git, SVN, JIRA, CI/CD pipelines, App Store Connect, EAS Build, TestFlight, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, Telegram bot API |
| Methodologies | SAFe / Scrum, Situational Leadership (SL-II), Model-Based Development, V-Model, data-driven decision-making |
Get in Touch
Open to new opportunities and conversations.
📍 Izmir, TR | ✉️ aunsal89@gmail.com | 📞 +90-552-232-8144