Yavuz Alp Sencer ÖZTÜRK

Work Experience

Freya Voice - Founding Engineer (Feb 2026 - Present)

• Building real-time voice AI agents (YC S25)

Infrastack AI - Founding Engineer (Jun 2025 - Feb 2026)

• Built the reliability layer for AI powered development

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM - Research Engineer (Aug 2023 - Jun 2025)

• Post-training Turkish LLMs and built the largest Turkish fine-tuning dataset (1M+ rows)
• Global Top Contributor to Cohere’s Aya Project (ACL 2024 Best Paper)

Utrecht University - Research Intern in Multimodal NLP (Jul 2024 - Sep 2024)

• Developed synthetic data pipeline for VLMs
• Contributed to the Multimodal Aya Project
• Supervised by Dr. Ece Takmaz & Prof. Albert Gatt

TÜBİTAK Software Technologies Research Institute - Software Engineer Intern (Jun 2023 - Jul 2023)

• Built full-stack web applications using Spring Boot 3 and Next.js 13
• Worked in a CMMI Level 5 certified environment
• Mastered best software practices

Research

Bilkent University - Undergraduate Researcher with Prof. Eray Tüzün (Jan 2025 - Jun 2025)

• Working on automated agents for software development
• Co-authored Agents in the Sandbox: End-to-End Crash Bug Reproduction for Minecraft, accepted at ASE’25

Aykut Koç Lab, Bilkent University - Undergraduate Researcher (Sep 2023 - Jun 2024)

• Working on integrating transformers with GNNs for semi-supervised learning
• Paper submitted to ACL 2024
• Supervised by Prof. Dr. Aykut Koç

Education

Bilkent University - B.S. in Computer Science

Leadership & Community

Anthropic - Claude Community Leader (May 2026 - Present)

• Hosted Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code
• Leading the local AI research and engineering community

Bilkent AI Society - Founding President (Sep 2023 - Jun 2025)

• Founded and led the society’s initiatives and activities
• Official member of the NVIDIA Student AI Community and Notion Student Organizations
• Organized 10+ talks and Q&As with OpenAI, Cohere, Google Research, LinkedIn, and Harvard Medical School

NVIDIA - Student Network Lead (Jan 2024 - Jun 2025)

• Organized NVIDIA-certified training sessions for Bilkent students with kAI Sabancı, delivered live by NVIDIA experts

Cohere - Cohere Global Ambassador (Dec 2023 - Dec 2024)

• One of the Global Top Contributors of the Aya Project (ACL 2024 Best Paper)

Notion - Campus Leader (Sep 2023 - Jun 2025)

• Private beta tester of the new Notion AI
• Organized two in-person events (100+ attendees) on thought organization and project execution

Intelligene Search

"Perplexity for Genomics" - AI search engine processing 300M+ nodes and 1B+ edges with Graph RAG.
Best Data Science Project Award

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Rubber Duck AI

An educational multiagent LLM powered platform combining Feynman learning and Rubber Duck debugging techniques using knowledge graphs.
1st Place, Amazon AWS Competition

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Bilkent Online & Bilkent GPT

A social media platform with real-time RAG capabilities. Secured $5000 in funding.
1st Place at CS319, Supported by Microsoft

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Autonomous Drone Tracking UAV

Designed and implemented an autonomous flight algorithm using YOLO.
3rd Place, Teknofest F-UAV 2021

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Chat with My CV

An interactive AI-powered application that allows users to have natural conversations with my CV, providing a unique and engaging way to learn about my professional background.

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Personal Interests:

• AI Alignment: Exploring the ethical and philosophical dimensions of artificial intelligence.
• Philosophy: Mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. Topics like free will and meaning. Check out my philosophy link log. And, reach me out for a discussion!
• Linguistics: Fascinated by the structure and evolution of language.
• Personal Knowledge Management: Building systems for efficient learning and information organization (Obsidian, Notion, and TickTick).
• Self-Hosting & Linux: Managing 60+ Docker services on my personal VPS, including this website, my AI clone, personal Overleaf and Stirling PDF, LinkStack, Coolify, and more using Ngnix Proxy Manager and Portainer.
• Running: I love running. I recently ran a 10K at Runkara’24. Check me out at Strava.
• Linklogging: I’m a fan of linklogs (a type of blog for links only). I’ve been keeping a linklog for a while. You can check it out here.

Let’s connect! I’m always open to discussing new ideas and collaborations. Feel free to reach out through the contact form or connect with me on social media.