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.
01 — Interaction 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.
02 — iOS 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.
03 — Senior 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.
04 — Computer 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.
05 — Founder
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.
06 — Intelligent, 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.
Swift Ecosystem
The language and frameworks I build with day to day.
Architecture
Structuring codebases so they stay maintainable as they grow.
Computer Vision
Turning camera and sensor input into usable, model-ready data.
AI Integration
Bringing trained models and LLMs into production Apple apps.
Developer Tools
The everyday tooling behind a smooth engineering workflow.
Testing
Confidence that ships with the code, not after it.
CI/CD
Automating the path from commit to App Store.
Networking
Secure, reliable communication between device and server.
Privacy
Engineering practices that make privacy a default, not a setting.