About

Sedat Behar

I'm an engineering leader who builds outsized business impact through small, high-leverage teams. At Google, I lead a team driving format strategy across $XXB in Display traffic, with team-led initiatives contributing $XXXM in ARR last year — including work in generative AI (patent pending) and model-based layout optimization.

Before Google, I was Director of Engineering at Prudential Financial, where I scaled a 40-engineer organization across five teams and partnered with executive leadership on multi-year strategy, capacity, and budget. Earlier, I led the Capital Structure product line and platform modernization at Moody's Analytics.

Outside of work, I still love building — the Lab section of this site is where I experiment with new tech and side projects. I'm also active in nonprofit leadership within the Sephardic and Turkish Jewish communities.

Download resume

Experience

  1. Engineering Manager, Display Formats

    Google

    2022 — Present

    • Lead a team of six engineers driving format strategy and innovation for Google Display Advertising across $XXB in display traffic.
    • Delivered $XXXM in attributed ARR over the past year through new and optimized display formats, including $XXM from generative AI initiatives and $XXM from model-based layout optimization.
    • Co-inventor (patent pending) on generative AI methods for synthetic creation and enhancement of advertising image and text assets.
    • Own format roadmap and OKR planning for Responsive Display Ads, balancing advertiser ROI, publisher yield, and user experience.

  2. Director of Engineering, Digital Customer Experience

    Prudential Financial

    2018 — 2022

    • Scaled the engineering organization from three teams to five (~40 engineers) over four years, building the tech-lead layer.
    • Doubled traffic and lifted engagement 80% on PGIM marketing sites through a complete redesign and stack migration.
    • Launched personalized marketing interstitials on Prudential.com reaching XM unique monthly users, lifting response rate 8%.
    • Stood up enterprise API gateway and service-bus architecture, and partnered with the CTO on multi-year strategy and budget.

  3. Tech Lead / Associate Director

    Moody's Analytics

    2014 — 2018

    • Built the Capital Structure product from the ground up, scaling to 20+ analysts capturing 1,000+ entities representing $XT in debt data.
    • Delivered rich internet applications rendering grid, tree, and graph visualizations of capital structures using D3 and React.
    • Co-architected the Moodys.com platform migration from .NET SharePoint to a modern Node.js stack on Hapi.js, React, and Redux.
    • Established full CI automation and stood up the API gateway with Kong and a containerized deployment pipeline.

  4. IT Architect

    Westcon Group

    2006 — 2014

    • Architected Westcon's global e-commerce platform spanning 22 sites across 14 countries and integrated 30+ partner companies.
    • Led data-center consolidation and full virtualization onto Cisco UCS.
    • Stood up a Captiva OCR pipeline processing ~200,000 documents annually with no human intervention.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks

  • C#
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • Python
  • React
  • Redux
  • Angular
  • .NET

AI & LLMs

  • LLMs
  • AI Agents
  • AI-Driven Development
  • Claude
  • Gemini

Platforms & Data

  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • Docker
  • MongoDB
  • SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • Neo4j

APIs & Integration

  • REST
  • GraphQL
  • Kong
  • MuleSoft
  • Apigee

Leadership

  • Engineering Management
  • Org Scaling
  • Multi-Year Strategy
  • Capacity Planning
  • System Design