Founder & Engineer at Stele AI | Software Engineer Email: serkanyersen@gmail.com | Website: serkan.dev | Location: Bay Area, CA
Staff-level software engineer and founding engineer with 20 years of experience building complex client applications, frontend platforms, developer infrastructure, and engineering tools. Spent nearly seven years at Meta across WhatsApp Web, Desktop, Mobile Infrastructure, and agentic AI systems supporting a communication product used by 3+ billion people. Deep experience setting technical direction, building platforms used across engineering organizations, mentoring teams, and remaining hands-on with implementation.
2026 - Present | Foster City, CA
Founded and built Stele, a persistent shared-memory platform that allows AI coding agents and engineering teams to retain project decisions, history, tasks, and reasoning across sessions, tools, and developers.
Designed the product and technical architecture from the ground up, spanning knowledge systems, agent integrations, developer tooling, APIs, infrastructure, and product UX.
Built and open-sourced Strata, a CLI and TypeScript library that normalizes session histories across nine coding-agent platforms into a common model for search, inspection, replay, cost analysis, and real-time monitoring.
Built an open benchmarking and evaluation framework for measuring the impact and overhead of persistent agent memory, publishing reproducible evidence including positive, negative, and null results.
2019 - 2026 | Menlo Park, CA
Rebuilt WhatsApp Web's custom build system, reducing development builds from roughly 20 minutes to seconds and production builds from around 40 minutes to 1-2 minutes.
Built foundational frontend infrastructure across the WhatsApp Web stack, including build tooling, bundling, transforms, linting, performance optimization, architectural boundaries, and Electron desktop integration.
Led major parts of the release infrastructure responsible for reliably shipping Android, iOS, Web, and Desktop releases to 3+ billion users.
Overhauled release systems and developer tooling used by roughly 5,000 engineers, enabling teams to safely ship critical changes every week at global scale.
Led a team of five engineers focused on developer experience, setting technical direction and building platforms, APIs, automation, on-demand environments, and release tooling that improved engineering velocity and incident response.
Partnered across client, backend, QA, security, and infrastructure organizations to simplify complex workflows and establish more reliable release practices across platforms.
Spent the final three years building agentic AI workflows for real software-engineering environments, including knowledge agents capable of navigating complex release systems and development infrastructure.
Led an effort that moved engineering workflows toward an AI-native model in roughly two weeks by exposing previously human-only systems through APIs, CLIs, MCPs, skills, and automations so engineers and agents could operate the same infrastructure.
2012 - 2019
Led a frontend team of six and owned technical direction across the company's frontend applications and platform, supporting Home Depot Pro workflows used by millions of customers.
Built frontend infrastructure end to end, spanning application architecture, CI, deployment, shared libraries, frameworks, and developer tooling that enabled teams to ship faster and more consistently.
Built a custom server-side rendering framework for Vue before Nuxt.js existed, providing routing, rendering, application structure, and deployment foundations for production applications.
2006 - 2012
Joined as employee #1 and built Jotform's original drag-and-drop form builder, an unusually complex browser application for the 2006 web platform.
Evolved the original application into Jotform V2, the company's first paid product, then led a team of four through Jotform V3, a major rewrite of the product and platform.
Built Memberkit, an internal CMS and application framework for rapidly creating products and tools, and Wishbox, an early visual-feedback product that later attracted acquisition interest from Facebook.
Strata (Stele AI). Open-source CLI and TypeScript API for searching, inspecting, replaying, and monitoring coding-agent sessions across multiple agent platforms. github.com/Stele-Dev/strata
DotState. Modern open-source dotfile manager and TUI written in Rust. dotstate.serkan.dev
Stele Bench. Open evaluation apparatus for controlled measurement of persistent memory in coding agents. github.com/Stele-Dev/stele-bench
Earlier open source. ifvisible.js, sync, and underscore.py. DotState and all three earlier projects reached the Hacker News front page. github.com/serkanyersen
Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Python, Flow, SQL, HTML, CSS
Client / Frontend: React, Redux, Electron, frontend architecture, application frameworks, rendering, design systems, performance optimization
Developer Infrastructure: Build systems, Webpack, Babel, CI/CD, release infrastructure, monorepos, static analysis, codemods, CLI tooling
Backend / AI: Node.js, GraphQL, service architecture, distributed workflows, agentic systems, MCP, AI-assisted development, developer-agent integrations
Bilkent University - Computer Technologies & Programming 2001 - 2005 | Ankara, Turkey