Emel Şimşek
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Ankara, Ankara, Turkey
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEmel Şimşek is a Senior Software Engineer based in Ankara with 10 years of professional experience and a deep background in networking, security, and distributed systems. Currently at Microsoft, she brings hands-on expertise from roles spanning product management and research leadership—having promoted FLOSS adoption in government at TUBITAK and managed development of a multicore Next Generation Firewall. Her contributions to the well-known Citus distributed PostgreSQL project show a strong grasp of database internals, improving shard copy operations, constraint handling, and stability with auto_explain. Emel’s career blends low-level C/C++ network protocol work with higher-level system design and team leadership, reflecting comfort across both implementation and delivery. She holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from METU and often operates at the intersection of open source, performance optimization, and pragmatic productization. A less obvious strength is her ability to translate research and open-source improvements into production-ready features across diverse, mission-critical platforms.
10 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
M.S., Computer Engineering, M.S., Computer Engineering at Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi / Middle East Technical University
English
Github Skills (18)
administrator10
postgresql10
admin10
databases10
database-administration10
citus10
administration10
sql10
database-cluster10
distributed-database10
database10
backend9
performance-tuning8
performance-analysis8
performance-testing8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
citusdata/citus
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:104 reviews, 11 commits, 72 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Emel primarily focused on fixing bugs and implementing features related to the distributed database functionality of Citus. Their contributions include resolving issues causing crashes when using the auto_explain extension, enabling the use of ALTER TABLE commands for constraint creation, and enhancing the shard copy operations to handle generated columns effectively. The user also worked on improving the maintenance daemon and the performance of the CitusHasBeenLoaded function, demonstrating a strong understanding of the database's internal workings.
distributedrelational-databasesqlcitusscale
emelsimsek/pgbouncer
Jun 2023 - Mar 2024
lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL
Contributions:69 pushes, 1 branch in 8 months
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