About
I’m Osman Başkaya. I develop AI products and lead engineering teams.
Now
Building the AI behind Fieldguide.
I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Fieldguide, responsible for 12 people across AI Platform, AI Quality, and Data Science. My teams own the AI infrastructure, agent quality, evaluation, and data capabilities behind an AI-native platform for audit and advisory firms.
- The agent platform
- LLM gateway, Temporal-based orchestration, observability, and document processing and search.
- Eval-first culture
- Offline and online evaluations back every model and prompt change.
- Model providers
- I lead our work with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
- Hiring
- Helped hire around 20 engineers across AI, platform, and infrastructure.
Before
Founding Lumiro AI.
I founded Lumiro AI, an AI tour guide offering interactive audio tours and personalized, real-time experiences, so travelers can explore destinations at their own pace, tailored to their interests.
- Vision to launch
- Founded the company and led product, engineering, and go-to-market.
- Built it end to end
- The iOS and Android apps, backend infrastructure, and API ecosystem.
- A team of 6
- Assembled and managed engineers, designers, and marketers.
- Growth & partnerships
- Ran SEM, offline, and social campaigns, and closed a strategic partnership with Landing.
Earlier
Five years of ML at Twilio.
I spent three years as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, then became an Engineering Manager, leading a team that built a centralized ML platform and improved the speech engine, and overseeing Twilio Autopilot.
- 80% fewer incidents
- Built a new team around Twilio Autopilot and cut incidents and on-call load of the GA product by 80%.
- Autopilot end of life
- Owned the sunset from planning to execution, across Product, Finance, GTM, Sales, and customers.
- A 7-figure contract
- Built a T5-based classify-extract-normalize model that improved F1 by 35% and helped land a major customer.
- The ML platform
- Designed the ML metadata service and a Kubernetes-based Transformer service for few-shot models.
The path
From İzmir to San Francisco.
Early years · İzmir
Born in İzmir
A city on the West Coast of Turkey.
2008 – 2012 · Istanbul
Bahçeşehir University
Moved to Istanbul for college and earned degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics, graduating first in the Engineering department.
2012 – 2015 · Istanbul
AI Lab at Koç University
Master’s degree in Machine Learning and NLP with Deniz Yuret. My word sense induction system outperformed every other entry at SemEval.
2014 – 2015 · Istanbul
First data scientist at eBrandValue
A YC-backed startup, where I owned the NLP stack and led a patent evaluation system that won $250K in national research funding.
2015 – 2016 · Istanbul
Huawei Research
Worked with a team of scientists on NLP problems from machine translation to NER, and built a meaning-based MT quality metric published at EACL 2017.
2016 – 2018 · Boston
Seven Bridges Genomics and Totient
Moved to the United States. Worked on representation of somatic mutations and built a benchmarking tool for variant callers.
2018 – 2021 · Bay Area
Twilio, Staff ML Engineer
Helped design Twilio’s machine learning platform, from the serving layer to the model trainer to model registry, and asset manager.
2021 – 2023 · Bay Area
Twilio, Engineering Manager
Led engineers and ML scientists on the centralized ML platform and the speech engine, and oversaw Twilio Autopilot.
2024 – 2025 · San Francisco
Lumiro AI
Founded an AI tour guide with interactive audio tours and personalized, real-time experiences. Built the iOS and Android apps, backend infrastructure, and API ecosystem, and led a team of 6 engineers, designers, and marketers.
2025 – Now · San Francisco
Fieldguide
Senior Engineering Manager for AI Platform, AI Quality, and Data Science.
Research
A decade of NLP & ML.
15+ years in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with research published in EACL, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and SemEval.
Off the clock
Tennis
Big fan. I play, and I go to tournaments to watch.
Motorcycling
Riding my KTM RC 390 around the city.
Skiing
Learned in 2024 and went from bunny slope to black. Next up: getting comfortable on moguls.
Traveling
Paris is my default, but Asia is next: Thailand and Japan.
Tango
It’s been a while. Time to dust off my tango shoes.