Arda Akman

I'm Arda. I build backend systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

I'm currently at Thunder Compute in the Bay Area. Before that I was a founding engineer at Delve (YC W24) and a backend engineer at Sigma Computing. I studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where I also spent a couple of years teaching CS 61C to a few hundred students at a time.

I'm a history buff who likes building things that are meant for scale. I speak English, Turkish, German, and some sign language, and I've worked with the TIED foundation on apps that help hearing-impaired children learn sign language.

Experience

Thunder Compute

Present

Software Engineer · San Francisco Bay Area

Building cloud GPU infrastructure that makes accelerated compute cheap and instant. Currently hiring.

Delve (YC W24)

2024 – 2026

Founding Engineer · San Francisco

Founding engineer building compliance automation — one of the most intense, rewarding, and fun chapters so far.

Sigma Computing

Jun 2024 – 2024

Backend Engineer · Data Governance

Led projects around authentication (OAuth, SAML), permissions, auditing, and security. Built and hardened the public API and customer audit data pipelines with dbt for enterprise customers like banks and financial institutions. AWS, MySQL, Snowflake/Snowpark, TypeScript, Golang, React, Kubernetes.

Projects

Education & Recognition

University of California, Berkeley

2020 – 2024

B.S. Computer Science

CS 61C Teaching Assistant · Mobile Developers at Berkeley · AI Entrepreneurs at Berkeley · Computer Science Mentors · Eta Kappa Nu.

Top 25 Most Successful Turkish Graduates, 2024 English Türkçe Deutsch Sign Language