Tolga Kurtoglu has held several different jobs throughout his professional career. Tolga Kurtoglu was born in Turkey, but later moved to the United States of America. After successfully entering a Masters program at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, Tolga Kurtoglu worked in the area of sketch recognition developing intelligent sketch understanding algorithms to be used by CAD tools, an important engineering design program. Tolga Kurtoglu graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2001 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.

After working at Carnegie Mellon University for a number of years, Tolga Kurtoglu started a job working for Dell, a prominent technology and electronics company. At Dell Tolga Kurtoglu worked as a Mechanical Design Engineer. Tolga Kurtoglu worked in the Server Development Department and worked with several different products in the Dell computer product line. Tolga Kurtoglu was also a lead engineer in the Server Development Department, a role which helped him to develop his leadership skills and grow as an engineer and researcher. Working for Dell was enjoyable for Tolga Kurtoglu, however he eventually left Dell and started his doctoral education at the University of Texas at Austin. While at the University of Texas at Austin, Tolga Kurtoglu developed a new computational theory by combining empirical reverse engineering techniques and graph theoretical methods. Tolga Kurtoglu graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, also with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.

After receiving his doctoral degree, Tolga Kurtoglu became a research scientist at NASA. Tolga Kurtoglu worked as a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center from August 2007 until August 2010. While working at the NASA Ames Research Center, Tolga Kurtoglu developed computer-aided tools that were used to design, operate and analyze very complex human-machine systems and reduce fault events throughout the lifecycle of these systems. Tolga Kurtoglu won the NASA Ames Technical Excellence Award in 2009 for his outstanding work as an engineer and scientist in this program.