Yavuz Alp Sencer ÖZTÜRK

I’m Alp, a Founding Lead Engineer at InfraStack AI, building the reliability layer for AI-powered development. Working on development and evaluation of agentic systems, context engineering and reinforcement learning.

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I’m passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI, particularly in Generative AI and Natural Language Processing.

Chat with my AI clone to learn more!

Work Experience

Infrastack AI - Founding Engineer (Jun 2025 - Present)

Building reliability layer for AI powered development
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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 - Present)

Working on automated agents for software development

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

Leadership & Community

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

Founded and leading the society’s initiatives and activities

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

Leading NVIDIA’s student AI initiatives at Bilkent University

Notion - Campus Leader (Sep 2023 - Jun 2025)

Leading Notion’s campus initiatives at Bilkent University

Intelligene Search

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

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

Bilkent Online & Bilkent GPT

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

Autonomous Drone Tracking UAV

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

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.

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.

news

Jan 1, 2026	Accepted to MenaML Winter School 2026. Sponsored by Google DeepMind and KAUST.
Dec 17, 2025	Hosted Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, at our meetup sponsored by Anthropic.
Nov 1, 2025	Our paper “Agents In The Sandbox” accepted to ASE 2025, a top-tier A* software engineering conference. Developed BugCraft, the first end-to-end framework for automatically reproducing crash bugs in games. Co-authored with Eray Yapağcı and Prof. Eray Tüzün. Paper and Project.
Jul 7, 2025	Accepted to RAISE Summit 2025, one of Europe’s biggest AI summits, thanks to Y Combinator.
Jul 7, 2025	Accepted to YC x Paris Event, meeting Solomon Hykes (Docker founder), Paul Copplestone (Supabase founder), and YC General Partners Tom Blomfield (GoCardless, Monzo) and Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia).
Jun 15, 2025	Started as Founding Lead Engineer at Infrastack AI — SF, CA (remote).
May 31, 2025	Won “The Best Data Science Project” award at Bilkent University Senior Projects for developing Intelligene, an agentic search engine on massive genomics knowledge graph data, selected from 44 teams. Developed in collaboration with Yusuf Kesmen, Mehmet Bahattin Dulkadiroğlu, Alpsencer Özdemir, and Yiğit Küçük.
May 30, 2025	Won $3,000 at Bilkentpreneurs Challenge 2025 with Team Kocly, placing 3rd among 26 applicant teams. Developed in collaboration with Emre Bektaş, Alpsencer Özdemir, İpek Öztemir, and Ebrar Sabit.
Apr 30, 2025	Placed 4th out of 150 teams at ALPOC’25, an algorithm and programming competition at Bilkent University, competing with Atak Talay Yücel and Alpsencer Özdemir. Selected as one of 12 finalists.
Jan 1, 2025	Accepted to MenaML Winter School 2025. Sponsored by Google DeepMind and QCRI.
Dec 5, 2024	Organized an AI Inspiration Panel at Bilkent University with 13 alumni from leading companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, and IBM. The event, in collaboration with Global Turks AI and sponsored by Türkiye İş Bankası AI Startup Factory, brought together 400+ face-to-face attendees, including students, academicians, and industry leaders, to discuss AI development in Türkiye.
Oct 24, 2024	Became a Global Ambassador for Cohere For AI’s Aya Expanse Project.
Sep 18, 2024	First place in the Amazon Competition at Bilkent University for the Rubber Duck AI project, developed in collaboration with Yusuf Kesmen and Eray Yapağcı. Awarded a $4,000 Gen AI Scholarship, along with mentorship and referrals from Amazon.
Aug 25, 2024	The Maya (Multimodal Aya) project, which I was a member of, has been selected as “The Most Promising Project” at Cohere For AI’s AI expedition.
Jun 10, 2024	Accepted to Utrecht University NLP Research Group as a Research Intern for summer 2024; granted Erasmus+ Traineeship Scholarship.
Apr 10, 2024	Bilkent Online project has been accepted into the Microsoft Founders Hub and has received a grant worth over $5000 in total from Microsoft and OpenAI.
Jan 26, 2024	Bilkent AI Society was accepted into the NVIDIA Student Network program, and I became an NVIDIA Student Network Community Leader at Bilkent University.
Dec 25, 2023	Bilkent Online project selected as the best project in the Bilkent University CS 319.
Dec 17, 2023	Became Top Contributor of Cohere For AI Aya Project, ranked #16 in global leaderboard.
Sep 15, 2023	Became the Notion Campus Leader of Bilkent University (one of the 2 CLs in Turkey).
Sep 10, 2023	Selected as the Founding President of Bilkent AI Society
Jul 31, 2023	Internship: TÜBİTAK BİLGEM B3LAB Software Development (NLP and LLMs)
Jun 20, 2023	Internship: TÜBİTAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) Software Development Institute Software Development
May 10, 2023	Founded the Bilkent AI Society with our core team.
Apr 8, 2022	Awarded Turkish Education Foundation (TEV) Outstanding Achievement Scholarship
Mar 30, 2022	Speaker at the opening talk for the STEM Education and Coordination Center.
Jan 2, 2022	Launched the website and education portal for the STEM Education and Coordination Center for gifted students. (Funded by the European Union and the Turkish Ministry of Education)
Sep 17, 2021	Ranked 3rd at TEKNOFEST 2021 Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Competition (World’s Largest Aviation, Space and Technology Festival)
Sep 13, 2021	Started Computer Science degree at Bilkent University.