# Sinan Surucu

> Engineering leader based in Dublin, Ireland. Software Engineering Manager at MongoDB, previously engineering execution lead for the Riot Games Web Store and a technology & engineering manager at Accenture's Innovation Centre. Co-founder of Shoop, a retail analytics startup. Currently building toward a founder role and looking for the right problem to commit to.

Sinan Surucu (also written Sinan Sürücü) has spent his career taking ambiguous problems and making them work: writing code in private banks in Istanbul, co-founding a startup with university friends, and leading engineering teams at Accenture, Riot Games, and MongoDB. He works across people, product, and systems, and is comfortable talking to a CEO and a backend engineer in the same afternoon. He has hired and let people go, shipped under pressure, and, by his own account, learned more from what did not work than from what did.

He is currently talking to founders and domain experts, searching for a hard, overlooked problem to commit to as a founder or founding engineer. He also wants to hear from investors and operators working near those problems, and is open to senior engineering leadership roles where the problem is genuinely hard.

## Current focus

- Building toward a founder role: talking to founders and domain experts, looking for the right problem to commit to.
- Software Engineering Manager at MongoDB, leading engineering for an internal tooling platform (~2,500 users) and the external enterprise support portal.
- [Chronio](https://chronioapp.com/): a personal productivity app he builds on the side.
- Sharpening marketing and business acumen; taking Yale's "Introduction to Negotiation" course.

## Work history

- **MongoDB** (2024–present) — Software Engineering Manager. Leads engineering for two products in MongoDB's Customer Organisation: an internal tooling platform serving around 2,500 users, and the external support portal enterprise customers use to manage cases and system access. Redesigned incident triage protocols and built delegation frameworks adopted by partner teams.
- **Riot Games** (2021–2024) — Software Engineering Manager. Led engineering execution for the Riot Web Store, including the payment gateway integration that enabled the first in-game asset purchases outside the game client. Managed a team of 9 in a live-ops environment.
- **Accenture** (2016–2020) — Technology & Engineering Manager at the Innovation Centre in Dublin. Led engineering delivery for a Zero-Based Cost Transformation programme; built data ingestion and analytics platforms for large enterprise clients. Also worked on AI, IoT, and emerging-tech products.
- **Shoop** (2014–2016) — Co-founder (Product & R&D). Co-founded a retail analytics startup in Istanbul. Built StoreFlow, a platform using WiFi/BLE signals to map real-time customer behaviour in stores and shopping malls. Won a startup competition and raised from a private investment bank.

## Links

- [Website](https://ssurucu.com): home, /now, /work, /writing, and contact.
- [Now page](https://ssurucu.com/#/now): what he is working on, reading, and thinking about, rewritten monthly.
- [Writing](https://ssurucu.wordpress.com): essays, roughly one a month.
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssurucu/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/ssurucu)
- [Linktree](https://linktr.ee/ssurucu)
- [Full site content for LLMs](https://ssurucu.com/llms-full.txt)

## Contact

Reach him through the [contact form](https://ssurucu.com/#/connect) or [book a 30-minute call](https://cal.com/ssurucu/30min). He reads every message and answers most within a week.