About

Hi, I’m Mert, a full-stack ML engineer.

I love trying to understand the structure, dynamics, interactions, and evolution of things. I’ve spent the last decade building ML systems end to end, across startups and scale-ups.

Some of what I’ve built:

At Tenderd (Principal ML Engineer, 2024–now), an AI platform for heavy equipment and vehicle operations: the greenfield ML platform spanning the full ML lifecycle in a monorepo, vision-based crane cycle detection, driver action classification, worksite hazard detection, a driver safety score with an agentic system on top, and telemetry-based utilization, fuel, and emissions modeling, now two patents I’m a named inventor on.

At BECO Capital (Lead Data Scientist, 2022–2024), a leading MENA VC, where I was the first data scientist: a retrieval-augmented research system over dealflow and market data, probabilistic entity resolution over fragmented sources and growth-signal scoring for automated deal sourcing, and the data and cloud infrastructure underneath, built from scratch.

At Swvl (Senior ML Engineer, 2020–2022), a NASDAQ-listed mass-transit unicorn: real-time demand-responsive pricing for marketplace balancing, an urban mobility digital twin for travel demand and network design, demand-side modeling for churn, route propensity, and demand forecasting, and the company’s first MLOps stack.

At Careem (Data Scientist, 2019–2020), the region’s top ride-hailing platform (acquired by Uber): an ML-backed platform for targeting and rider subsidy optimization, metric-agnostic time-series forecasting, and modeling for incentive ROI uplift, customer lifetime value, and price elasticity.

At Trendyol (Data Scientist, 2017–2019), Turkey’s largest e-commerce company (acquired by Alibaba), where I was part of the founding data science team: dynamic pricing, demand forecasting, product ranking, and a recommender system.

The trouble with summing a person up like this is that it files them under headings, which flattens more than it captures. So take the following as gestures, not categories, though these, at least, are non-negotiable and will outlast most things about me. I’m a cat person. I’m drawn to history, literature, and anthropology. I hike and snorkel. I might add more, but only if the data backs it up for long enough. This paragraph took me an unreasonable thirty minutes, so the probability of change, over any reasonable horizon, is near zero. But never zero.