A bit (pun intended) of my story: how I stumbled into IT, stayed by choice, and why I care so much about how we leverage Frontier AI tools to build and shape our current and future societies.
I was born in Istanbul and raised in the Bay Area. My story begins with my parents: my mother, a Materials Scientist whose sol-gel research brought our family to the United States through an invitation from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and my father, a Mechanical Engineer and ranking officer in the Turkish Navy who instilled discipline, service, and curiosity in everything around him. Together, they built a grounded, secular home that reshaped the course of our family’s history.
I spent a lot of my childhood trailing my mother through the halls of Universities, exploring Classrooms and Labs, and asking endless questions. Somewhere in there I picked up the idea that science, math, and technology are just different ways to understand the multi-verse. Those profound childhood moments led me to pursue IT as a career decades later, and why I still think the work is mostly about curiosity, drive, and experimentation.
My career unfolded across a mix of roles and environments diversifying my mindset. I started my IT journey at the Apple Store, where I fell in love with design, technology, and teaching as a certified software trainer for Prosumer Apps (e.g. Final Cut Pro 7 & X, Logic Pro). What resonated most was Apple’s Steps of Service: Approach, Probe, Present, Listen, and End, which gave me a structured way to engage with people by understanding needs first, tailoring the solution, and closing with clarity and care.
From there I moved to Hulu’s first call center, which is where I got my first real taste of SaaS operations through Zendesk. I figured out that the tools you give a support team shape the experience of every user and customer. Great customer service is built on speed, empathy, and ownership, consistently resolving issues while making customers feel heard.
I got my first Corporate IT opportunity at ZEFR, an ad-tech company in Los Angeles, where I learned IT from the ground up. I decommissioned servers in data centers, configured on-premises infrastructure, administered the full SaaS stack, set up SCIM and SSO, and kept an international hardware fleet running. From Active Directory administration to cable termination and VLAN configuration, it was the best kind of apprenticeship: fast, broad, and entirely hands-on.
After a 13-year detour in Los Angeles, I returned home to the Bay Area with a Dual BA from CSUN and professional IT experience. I joined DoorDash as an IT Support Engineer and later grew into a CorpSec TPM, while also serving as Principal Atlassian Administrator. I cherished and learned through each collaboration opportunity across different disciplines, building on a strong ITIL foundation and Agile coaching experience as a Certified Scrum Master. Much of my work focused on helping partners across IT, Security, HR, Legal, Finance, and Procurement rethink how they operated within a shared toolchain and how cross-functional work could be made more effective, scalable, and thoughtful.
After my first true hypergrowth experience, I was offered the opportunity to become Head of IT at Nextdoor. After years of working across IT in a variety of roles, I felt it was the right time to step into leadership. At Nextdoor, I led the corporate IT organization, managing a team of five through an Okta Identity Engine upgrade, an IGA rollout, Device Trust, Zero Touch, and a full return-to-office program, while also launching new offices in New York and London. I owned the function end to end, from strategy, budgeting, and resource and capacity planning to the tactical execution required to keep the organization running smoothly day to day. I also put in place the identity, access, and device management policies across the company’s core systems that helped protect the business as it scaled.
At OpenAI, I founded the IT Systems Operations function and established a technical operations program within one of the fastest-moving environments I’ve worked in. The program spanned everything from user lifecycle and IAM management to vendor risk assessments, M&A integrations, and support for special programs across multiple org units. Our team delivers engineering for IT support and operations across IT Engineering and Enterprise Security, building the systems, automations, and workflows behind scalable support, secure access, and operational readiness across the company. Our productivity stack sits on a foundation of traditional SaaS, but it is increasingly embedded with our own technology and amplified by our research.
I believe the next evolution of ITIL is coming sooner than most expect, reshaped by unified chat-based intake, where models can evaluate user intent, understand context, and classify requests in real time against policy. That foundation will enable automation across systems through agentic self-service, with policy frameworks that become increasingly adaptive and self-maintaining. In that future, agents will safely operate across the full enterprise stack with both read and write access, eventually even autonomously, unlocking a fundamentally different model for IT operations and system administration. That is the transformation I want to help teams embrace and turn into reality proactively.
To build IT that feels intuitive, anti-fragile, and secure, and that is genuinely focused on enabling the people who utilize it. A lot of that work is finding the unique middle ground between security policy and risk acceptance, so teams can move and ship without unintentional guardrails, while still being protected.
I'm a dad. My four-year-old daughter is the reason I care, at work and at home, about how we bring AI into the world. I want her to grow up with tools that make her more capable, more curious, and more confident, not tools that quietly shape what she believes, who she trusts, or how she sees herself.
The technology my generation is shipping right now is more transformational than anything I've ever worked on, and it can tilt in either direction. AI has the potential to empower current and future generations to learn, build, and explore at unprecedented scale, or destabilize their foundation, erode real relationships, and teach them to defer to machines.
I believe safety has to be our first priority when we deploy this wave of technology, not an afterthought or a compliance checkbox, but the core principle that guides how we design, build, and deploy. If we handle this moment responsibly, my daughter and kids her age may thrive with these tools, but if we get it wrong, they and posterity will be the ones quietly paying the bill.
Peace,
Barry