SB/serdar

About

I design, engineer, and ship — not just one of the three.

Sixteen years, one throughline: making complex technology disappear behind something that feels obvious to use.

I'm Serdar Bakirtas, a Senior Apple Platform Engineer based in Berlin. My career doesn't follow the usual "learned to code, got a job, climbed the ladder" arc — it started in a very different discipline, and I think that's exactly why the products I build now feel the way they do.

01Interaction Designer

I started my career designing interactive digital campaigns for international brands — the kind of work where every hover state, transition, and moment of feedback was scrutinized. That background still shapes how I work today: the animation timing I choose, the empty and error states I bother to design properly, and how naturally I collaborate with product designers instead of just implementing their files. It's where I learned that the feeling of quality lives in details most people never consciously notice.

02iOS Engineer

The move into engineering wasn't a rejection of design — it was a way to own the whole outcome instead of handing a spec to someone else. Objective-C was unforgiving in ways Flash never was, and I loved it immediately.

03Senior Apple Platform Engineer

Over a decade across consultancies and product companies, I kept gravitating toward the hardest architectural problems — migrating legacy codebases, breaking monoliths into modules, leading teams through UIKit-to-SwiftUI transitions on products used by millions.

04Computer Vision & CoreML

At Magnosco, engineering met science directly. Translating a research team's PyTorch models into production Swift, building the OpenCV pipelines that feed them clean data, and making sure a medical device's Wi-Fi connection never fails a clinician mid-exam — this is the most demanding, most rewarding work I've done.

05Founder

Building Momena alone — design, engineering, encryption, App Store operations, support — was the fastest way I know to find out which of your instincts actually hold up when there's no one else to defer to.

06Intelligent, Privacy-First Products

Today my work sits at the intersection of all of it: architecture discipline from a decade of Apple platform engineering, a design sensibility from where I started, and a growing focus on bringing on-device AI into products without compromising the privacy users are trusting you with.

Technical expertise

The tools behind the work

Not a progress-bar skill chart — the categories of work I actually spend my time on, and why each one matters to the products I build.

Apple Platforms

Native product development across the Apple ecosystem.

iOSiPadOSmacOSwatchOS fundamentalsApp Store operations

Swift Ecosystem

The language and frameworks I build with day to day.

SwiftSwiftUISwiftDataCombineSwift Concurrency

Architecture

Structuring codebases so they stay maintainable as they grow.

Modular Swift packagesClean ArchitectureMVVMDependency injection

Computer Vision

Turning camera and sensor input into usable, model-ready data.

OpenCVCore ImageImage preprocessingFeature extraction

AI Integration

Bringing trained models and LLMs into production Apple apps.

CoreMLOn-device inferencePyTorch-to-Swift translationLLM-powered features

Developer Tools

The everyday tooling behind a smooth engineering workflow.

XcodeSwift Package ManagerInstrumentsGit

Testing

Confidence that ships with the code, not after it.

XCTestSnapshot testingCharacterization testsUI testing

CI/CD

Automating the path from commit to App Store.

FastlaneGitHub ActionsXcode CloudTestFlight automation

Networking

Secure, reliable communication between device and server.

mTLSURLSessionREST APIsOffline-first sync

Privacy

Engineering practices that make privacy a default, not a setting.

AES-256 encryptionCryptoKitOn-device processingData minimization