I am a Principal AI Engineer at Finster AI, an AI-native financial research startup. As the company’s first full-time hire in the United States, I have helped establish its New York presence and AI engineering efforts. My work focuses on production-grade agentic systems for finance workflows, including high-trust use cases that require traceable, auditable outputs grounded in cited sources.

Previously, I was a Founding Engineer, AI at Workmate Labs, an agentic AI startup backed by Kleiner Perkins, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Greylock. There, I helped take the first version of the company’s product from concept to market and built evaluation and monitoring systems for agentic workflows.

Before that, I was the first AI/ML hire at Own Company, a leading SaaS firm focused on data protection. I helped establish the company’s AI/ML function and ship its first AI-powered features before its acquisition by Salesforce.

Earlier in my career, I spent nearly four years at Zelus Analytics as one of the earliest hires. I helped scale the company into a leading sports intelligence platform used across major professional leagues, including the MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, IPL, and European soccer. Following its acquisition by Teamworks, the platform rebranded as Teamworks Intelligenceand continues to support professional sports organizations worldwide.

I began my career with internships at the Sacramento Kings and ShotTracker, working closely with front-office staff, coaches, and players in both NBA and college basketball. I supported data-driven decision-making and developed real-time broadcast visualizations featured nationally on Fox Sports and CBS Sports.

My academic background spans statistical machine learning, Bayesian modeling, probabilistic programming, and political methodology. During my master’s studies at Columbia University, I conducted mentored research with Dr. Andrew Gelman and contributed to the Stan project. I collaborated with Dr. Bob Carpenter at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) in New York and spent a summer with Dr. Aki Vehtari in Aalto University’s Probabilistic Machine Learning (PML) group in Finland. At Columbia, I received the Statistics Service Award for my work as student representative, as well as a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Fellowship.

At Brown University, I co-led the Sports Analytics Club, where we launched an undergraduate research group and a for-credit course in sports analytics. For my senior capstone, I applied probabilistic chess rating systems like Elo and Glicko to soccer data, earning Brown’s Undergraduate Statistics Capstone Award of Excellence. I studied Mandarin throughout college and spent a summer in East Asia, taking courses in Chinese language, religion, and politics.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my cat, Pera, playing chess on lichess.org, and staying involved in soccer as both a player and licensed coach (USSF C). I am passionate about advancing STEM education in Turkey, where I mentor students interested in statistics, AI, and political methodology. I am always happy to share my experiences with others exploring careers in these areas.