Gulsah is a Team Lead of Engineering and Certified Scrum Master at Zensurance. She joined the company on June 1st, 2020.
Growing up in Turkey, Gulsah always showed an interest in technology. She went to university to study as a Software Engineer, and double majored in Game Development. Throughout her schooling, she formed a passion for automation and digital transformation. After graduating from university, she immigrated to Canada (🇨🇦!) and started her career professionally. Before Zensurance, she worked in the ad-tech industry, specializing in global brand and performance-focused advertising technologies. She enjoys hunting for development best-practices and process improvements on a daily basis.
What do you do at Zensurance?
When I joined Zensurance as a Software Developer my responsibility was to maintain, improve and add new features to Zensurance's proprietary Pricing Engine and Documentation Systems.
After getting experience with more projects and initiatives at Zensurance, I was promoted to Senior Software Developer, where I was able to gain experience in mentoring better practices, solve more challenging problems, have more of a managerial role and lead the development team with our projects.
Additionally, as a Scrum Master, my responsibility is to ensure that Scrum theory and practices are well understood, oversee agile processes and team metrics, remove impediments if team members are blocked, and organize and facilitate agile events.
After working as a Senior Software Developer and gaining more interest in mentorship and leadership, I showed interest in a team lead role and continued to train with the help of my leads. I am now a Team Lead, Engineering at Zensurance!
What is the focus of your team?
My team is part of the Core Teams group, where we focus on adding and maintaining insurance products in our portfolio in the commercial insurance space. The work that our team does is extended to all the other engineering teams within Zensurance therefore our team’s throughput is essential for our business.
My team within the Core Group particularly focuses on keeping track of this throughput and resolves bottlenecks and delays within our process either by building tools or process improvements that can increase our team’s throughput.
What's your favorite project you've ever worked on?
My favorite project to work on was a custom game design and management tool. One of the most interesting features of this project was the ability to search over 30 platforms for images, videos, and assets, through a single unified interface, then automatically download, store and reference this content.
Why do you like working at Zensurance?
The people, culture, and the drive to automate and digitally transform a long-standing industry are some of the best benefits of working at Zensurance, where ideas are valued, listened to, and discussed safely and respectfully. It’s an environment where every developer learns from each other and pushes each other for a better version of themselves.
Aside from work, what do you like to do?
I like swimming, outdoor photography, gaming, and content creation. I occasionally do gaming and programming/game dev streams on Twitch.
Pre-pandemic, I took this photo of this beautiful Northern Hawk Owl in Schomberg, Ontario as my first outdoor bird photograph. They are super rare to be seen in Ontario, I feel super lucky! Such a great poser, don't you think?
