Çağatay Çallı
Senior ML/AI engineer – LLMs, search & recommendations.
Based in Ankara, Turkey. Mostly working remotely with product and data teams.
Some things about me
- Started in R&D and text mining (semantic search, NLP, GSoC, academic work on Explicit Semantic Analysis).
- Co-founded a social media analytics startup.
- Helped scale an online education marketplace, focusing on search, recommendations and ML infrastructure.
- Built cloud data platforms and large-scale data pipelines for a large energy company.
- Now independent, I help teams design and ship LLM, search and recommender projects end-to-end.
Some things I work on
- LLM-based information extraction, especially on messy real-world text.
- Search and ranking systems for marketplaces and content platforms.
- Recommender systems and cross-sell features close to the product.
- Data platforms and pipelines on modern data stacks (Spark, Hive, AWS).
- ML plumbing: evaluation, deployment paths, and the boring bits that keep models running.
Sometimes I do mobile apps too, mostly Android.
Some things I believe about ML & data work
- Most ML problems are product and data problems in disguise.
- Simple, well-instrumented models in production beat fancy models stuck in notebooks.
- Owning the full loop (data → model → serving → eval) matters more than owning a narrow slice.
- Clear metrics and honest evaluation save more time than any clever architecture.
Contact
Email: cagataycalli@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cagataycalli
GitHub: github.com/faraday