Hakan began his career at IBM Research, Almaden, where, alongside his Ph.D. work in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, he co-pioneered the concept of database-as-a-service, a contribution later recognized with the ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award. He went on to serve as Head of Data Management Research at NEC Labs, before joining Google, where he led teams building the data analytics infrastructure behind some of the company’s most critical businesses. He then joined Meta as head of Analytics in Data Infrastructure, overseeing a broad portfolio of data analytics infrastructure products and services, and later served at Confluent with responsibility for its full suite of cloud applications. He currently serves as the CTO of RelationalAI, an AI company whose mission is to power every decision with intelligence.