ACAAli Can Acar
LinkedIn

Curriculum vitae

Ali Can Acar

AI/ML engineer · Full-stack developer · Product designer

San Francisco / Bay Area
linkedin.com/in/alicanacar · alicanacar.com

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Summary

AI/ML engineer and product-minded full-stack developer with 15+ years designing and shipping digital products end to end. Currently founding Crawn and building onboard compute for spacecraft at Cosmic DynamiX. Nine-time hackathon winner, including first place at the MARA Hackathon (1 Bitcoin) and Best Usage of Apertus at Swiss AI Weeks in Zurich, 2025.

Experience

Cupertino · Hybrid

Cosmic DynamiX

AI/ML Developer & Designer

  • Build software for low-power onboard compute, so a spacecraft can filter and prioritize data before transmission.
  • Work on a reusable hardware and software platform meant for more than one mission and vehicle.
Onboard softwareLow-power computeSpacecraft data
Palo Alto

Crawn.ai

Founder, Full-Stack Developer & Designer

  • Founded an autonomous development platform where specialist agents plan, execute, and iterate on long-running product work.
  • Designed the loop, from planning through execution, evaluation, and self-correction, for coding sessions that run for hours, with a person at the approval gate.
PythonTypeScriptReactNode.jsLLM agentsVector DBsPostgreSQLDigitalOcean
Cupertino

Independent

UI/UX Designer & Full-Stack Developer

  • Designed and shipped 40+ web applications and digital products from first concept to production.
  • Owned the full lifecycle: research, interface design, architecture, deployment, and optimization.
ReactNode.jsJavaScriptPHPMySQLFigmaAdobeBlenderGit
San Francisco Bay Area

WhyAsk.Us

Founder, Full-Stack Developer & Designer

  • Founded a question-based social network and took it from zero to launch, including product, interface, architecture, and backend.
JavaScriptPHPMySQLSQLGit
Ankara · On-site

Agency 7

Full-Stack Developer & Designer

  • Designed and built e-commerce sites and custom web applications with an emphasis on usability and performance.
JavaScriptPHPMySQLSQLGit
Ankara · On-site

MG Communications

Full-Stack Developer & Designer

  • Built and maintained production websites and interactive applications, including database design, servers, and technical upkeep.
JavaScriptPHPMySQLLinuxGit

Hackathons

Nine wins.

San Francisco · Jun 2025
Panoptic

First place. MARA Hackathon. AI platform for data-center operations, energy arbitrage, and Bitcoin treasury management. Real-time global view of sites, satellite-backed scouting, an energy treasury for battery storage, and a market for energy, Bitcoin, and compute. Built with Jonathan Laplante, Rolan Marat, and Laurie Sartain. Prize: 1 Bitcoin.

Zurich · Oct 2025
CertusAI

Best usage of Apertus. Swiss AI Weeks. Open-source, multilingual search and summarization over Swiss law, built on Apertus, the sovereign model from EPFL, ETH Zürich, and CSCS. With Luca Saur. Prize: CHF 10,000.

Silicon Valley · Nov 2025
Agentic AI

Sponsor special award. Scoop AI Hackathon. Recognized for creativity and technical invention in agentic systems.

Jul 2026
Life Agent OS

United Nations & DigitalOcean. Major League Hacking. Mission-control AI for cities and humanitarian operations: live maps, news, environmental data, and drone imagery, with an agent that can run the workspace while people stay in charge.

Jul 2025
Talent Scout AI

A2A Agents Hackathon. HockeyStack. Ranks hackathon builders from GitHub, LinkedIn, and design work, scoring code quality, invention, craft, consistency, and how a team actually collaborates.

Jul 2025
CodeSage

Enterprise Agents Challenge. AWS MCP. Onboarding for engineering teams. Reads the real codebase, flags standard violations, and gives a new engineer a walkthrough grounded in production code.

May 2025
MrDroneAi

Best use of Clarifai. AWS MCP Agents. Infrastructure monitoring from drone video and audio. It maps road damage, lighting faults, leaks, and electrical issues, with priority alerts. Built with Clarifai, Bem.ai, and MiniMax.

Hacker Dojo · May 2025
AirWave

First place. Senza Hackathon · Synamedia. Interactive broadcast system for live audience response, designed and built across a 33-hour build.

Education

Yıldız Technical University

Bachelor’s degree, Visual Communication Design

Skills

AI & agents

  • Multi-agent systems
  • LLM agents
  • LangGraph
  • Prompt design
  • Evaluation loops
  • Vector databases

Full stack

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Node.js
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • JavaScript
  • PHP
  • Git

Design & infrastructure

  • Figma
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Blender
  • UI/UX
  • Docker
  • DigitalOcean
  • Linux