This blog series is dedicated to celebrating our Black, Latinx, and Women Engineers who are making an impact in the lives of our Gusties and Gustomers (Gusto customers) every day.

Today, we're spotlighting Ahsen Turksoy, who has been with Gusto for 9 months on the Benefits Automations team as part of Gusto Turkiye.

First, here’s a foreword from Ozlem Bali who supports our employees in Turkiye:

Greetings from the Turkiye Team!

My name is Ozlem and I’ve been at Gusto for 1 year – time flies fast at Gusto! :) I’m responsible for the Turkiye Team on the People side.

I wanted to share that our team had an onsite event in Istanbul with a fabulous view of Bosphorus at the beginning of July. It was amazing to see nearly everyone at this event in person, since we’re all working remotely in Turkiye.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy this blog post that highlights Ahsen Turksoy, one of our engineers in Gusto Turkiye.

- Ozlem

Jeremy: How did you join Gusto?

Ahsen: Last year I got connected with Gusto through a company called Remote Team, an HR platform for remote companies. Gusto acquired Remote Team, and in October 2022, Remote Team transitioned to Gusto as full-time Gusties, and the team is now known as Gusto Turkiye.

Jeremy: In your role here at Gusto, what has been one of your proudest accomplishments/impacts you have had on the SMB customers we serve?

Ahsen: I’m proud of building out our Benefits Automation functionality to help resolve any benefits-related operations quickly and accurately. For example, any renewals, enrollments, updates and terminations of benefits can be done through our Benefits Automation tools.

For example, if a customer sends in a request to enroll in a different plan for the new period, the tools we built automate this behind-the-scenes. They get enrolled to the new plan and the customer uses their benefits seamlessly.

Jeremy: Is the Gusto Turkiye team focused on the same project or are there different projects going on?

Ahsen: Yeah, we have different teams for different projects and some members work with other teams out of Gusto Turkiye. We have an International Contractor Payments Team which helps manage payments to contractors internationally.

Jeremy: What does your typical day at Gusto look like? What are your favorite parts of the day?

Ahsen: I spend most of my time designing and executing on projects, which is also my favorite part of the day. For example an automation project which enrolls our customers who are new to Gusto to benefit plans, or one which updates customers’ employees’ personal information on benefits so that the customer will have no issues using that benefit with their updated personal information.

Jeremy: How has Gusto played a role and supported you in your journey as an engineer?

Ahsen: I’ve been here for 9 months and I’ve been learning so much since I joined. Gusto has a great environment to further your engineering skills. For example, we have a mentorship program in which you can be a mentor and/or mentee.

We also have PEs (People Empowerer, our term for People Manager) who support us on our career goals. I have 1-on-1 meetings every week with my PE Sean to work together on my career goals. He puts me on projects for me to drive.

Jeremy: What advice would you give to someone looking to break into engineering or are just getting started?

Ahsen: I would say stay up-to-date with the technologies you are interested in or want to work on - which can be a coding language or a development tool- and keep learning by searching and practicing. Do projects with the skills you just learned. Try observing and approaching things from different angles. And repeating all these make good results, I think.

Jeremy: What are some resources you've learned from?

Ahsen: The internet! *laughs* There are so many helpful resources available on Udemy or YouTube.

Jeremy: What advice would you give to a more junior engineer on how to start operating at the senior level here at Gusto?

Ahsen: I would say decide your objective first and then define a step by step plan towards it. Work with your manager (at Gusto, we call these folks PEs or “people empowerers”) to build a roadmap based on company expectations for each engineering level.

Jeremy: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us!

Ahsen: Thank you!

Our interviewers are Jeremy and Kim Nguyen. Jeremy Murdy works on Gusto’s Invite Team to hire software engineering talent, while Kim builds features to improve the partner developer experience as part of Gusto Embedded.

If you are interested in building solutions that solve real-world problems in an inclusive and diverse environment, reach out to us on our career pages!