Çağatay Çallı

Senior ML/AI engineer – LLMs, search & recommendations.

Based in Ankara, Turkey. I mostly work remotely with product and data teams.

A few 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 pipelines for a large energy company.
• Now independent, I help teams design and ship LLM, search and recommender projects end-to-end.

What 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.

Thoughts 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