tk

Head of Platform at DERTOUR

Timur
Klenner-Yilmaz

Portrait of Timur Klenner-Yilmaz, Head of Platform at DERTOUR.

I lead engineering teams that own what they ship, and I'm moving them to agentic ways of working, with AI agents doing more of the heavy lifting.

I have been leading and mentoring engineers since 2022. My focus today: making AI part of how engineers build, decide and take ownership. Not a tool rollout, but a real change in practice.

Get in touch How I work

How I work

I have spent my career in e-commerce. Today I own the booking funnel for five travel brands: portal and content delivery, hotel and package search, and checkout. It runs on a large set of services and handles around 25 million visits and 60,000 bookings a year. But how those numbers come about matters more to me than the numbers themselves.

My teams run what they build. They decide on their own architecture, ship to production themselves many times a week, and own the consequences. I build the framework around that: guardrails, a strong review culture and a pipeline people can rely on. I stay out of decisions that a team closer to the problem will make better.

That is why I never treated the shift to AI-assisted development as handing out tool access. Getting the tools in place is the easy part, even when security and privacy need convincing and a budget needs signing off. The real work comes afterwards. Engineers who see their role being questioned need a reason to take part, not a mandate from above. I work with training, visible examples from our own codebase, and clear rules on where a machine may act and where a human has to decide. Without that clarity, adoption stalls at the first doubt.

Experience

  1. 2023– present

    Head of Platform

    DERTOUR Deutschland GmbH

    Turning a fragmented system landscape into one platform, and leading the people who run it.

    I own the platform behind the booking funnel of five travel brands: portal and content delivery, hotel and package search, and checkout. I lead six cross-functional teams, 15 engineers plus colleagues in other roles, in dual leadership with the product owners, and set the technical framework they work in: architecture guardrails, review culture and the delivery pipeline. Recruiting, onboarding and coaching are part of the job.

    • Platform strategy at scale: Consolidated four tech stacks into one multi-tenant, multi-language white-label platform (2020–2025). It now serves five consumer travel brands, the newest still in rollout, with around 25 million visits and 60,000 online bookings a year on one codebase.
    • Ownership over dependency: Raised the share of business-critical processes run in-house from 15% to 75%.
    • Reliability as a habit: Continuous, zero-downtime deployments with no fixed release days; peak season 2025 closed without a major incident.
    • Leading through change: Moving the teams to agentic development, with AI workflows built into how the platform is designed, shipped and operated.

  2. 2022– 2023

    Frontend Lead

    DER Touristik Online GmbH

    My first leadership role: shaping a team that delivers reliably.

    • Leading together with product: Led a six-person frontend team in dual leadership with the product owner.
    • Delivery people can plan on: Owned release quality and delivery dates.
    • Standards and growth: Established architecture standards and grew the team through mentoring and retrospectives.

  3. 2020– 2022

    Senior Frontend Developer

    DER Touristik Online GmbH

    Where architecture and mentoring came together.

    • Architecture thinking: Shaped the modular frontend architecture and microservice boundaries.
    • Quality and speed: Introduced automated testing and drove performance work.
    • Making others better: Mentored through code reviews and pair programming.

  4. 2018– 2020

    Frontend Developer

    DER Touristik Online GmbH

    The hands-on foundation I still lead from.

    • Technical depth: Built features on the multi-tenant travel platform with React, Next.js and Node.js.
    • Thinking beyond the feature: Focused on SEO, performance, monitoring and CI/CD.

  5. 2014– 2018

    Frontend Developer

    Haus Weilgut GmbH

    Building new products and modernizing existing ones.

    • Product development: Developed the Weilgut CRM Suite and mobile apps.
    • Modernization: Drove the migration of legacy systems to web and cloud solutions.

Leadership

Good engineering leadership is equal parts technical judgment and making it easy for people to do their best work. I run teams in dual leadership with product owners and care about the whole arc: recruiting, onboarding, growth and the day-to-day coaching that turns a group of developers into a team that ships with confidence.

  • AI enablementAgentic coding, governance for AI-generated code, tool integration
  • ArchitectureMulti-tenant platforms and microservices, hands-on for critical features
  • CultureYou build it, you run it; strong review culture and dependable pipelines
  • PeopleRecruiting, onboarding, growth plans and coaching

Education & languages

  1. 2013– 2014

    IT Specialist for Application Development (IHK-certified)

    Karlsruhe

  2. 2006– 2012

    Computer Science studies

    TH Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences

German
Native speaker
English
Full professional proficiency