ømerburakpolat
Ömer Burak Polat
Design Technologist
Amsterdam, Netherlands
omerburakpolat@gmail.com · +31 6 44 49 74 07
I'm a design technologist 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.
experience
- Initiated a company mission from unsolicited strategy through to build — reframed a monetization problem as a structural distribution problem, presented to the management team, led the resulting mission as design technologist.
- Built the team's prototyping pipeline, mission knowledge base, and an AI-operable design system published organization-wide — 68 generated components any colleague can prototype against in Claude.
- Ran enablement for the design team: the 'Idea to Vibecode' L&D series, prompt libraries, templates, workshops.
- Ships production frontend. Root-caused an upstream framework type-generation defect surfacing through a lint-flag and build-cache interaction.
- 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.
- 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.
education
- Middle East Technical University
Master of Architecture
Ankara, TR · 2010—2014
- İzmir University of Economics
Bachelor of Architecture
İzmir, TR · 2005—2009
tools
Hand
made directly- Figma — Design systems, product design, L&D material.
- Cinema 4DTODO(obp): one line — what it is used for
- Adobe SuiteTODO(obp): one line — what it is used for
- Final CutTODO(obp): one line — what it is used for
- 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
- Supabase · Vercel — Deployed prototypes with real endpoints and auth.
languages
- TurkishNative
- EnglishC2
- DutchA2
colophon
I wrote the spec. An agent wrote the code. Most of my time went on deciding which of its suggestions were wrong.
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, build, test. 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 diagram on my CV isn't a retrofit — it's what produced the CV. 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.
“The specificity is the job.”
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