Melvin Tercan
Head Of Engineering at Octagon
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMelvin Tercan is a startup engineer and serial founder with 16 years of experience leading product-driven engineering teams from early stage to scale, currently Head of Engineering at Octagon in San Francisco. He has steered technical orgs across healthcare, on-demand services, fintech and consumer marketplaces — including founding-stage leadership at Wag! and CTO roles at Paway and Tinypay — blending hands-on engineering with strategic product and go-to-market thinking. Known for pragmatic problem-solving, he pairs backend systems expertise (including contributions to the Kohana PHP core focused on UTF-8 and MIME handling) with a founder’s appetite for rapid iteration. He’s comfortable translating research-grade AI ambitions into shipped features, as evidenced by his current role supporting Superhuman-level investment research backed by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. Educated across Rotterdam School of Management and Harvard programs, Melvin brings cross-border perspective from the Netherlands to the Bay Area tech ecosystem. Colleagues describe him as an engineering leader who balances code-level attention to detail with the ability to scale teams and products quickly.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Economics & Business Administration, Economics & Business Administration at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus UniversityBachelor of Liberal Arts (ALB), Extension Studies, Business Administration and Management, Bachelor of Liberal Arts (ALB), Extension Studies, Business Administration and Management at Harvard University
English, Dutch, Turkish, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (4)
text-manipulation10
php10
kohana10
file-handling9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
kohana/core
Aug 2013 - Aug 2013
Core system classes from Kohana
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 3 days
Contributions summary:Melvin primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Kohana framework. Their work focused on refining the UTF8 class, addressing issues related to character encoding and string manipulation. These changes include fixing typos in documentation, resolving a class loading issue, and correcting mime type handling for file responses. The commits demonstrate a focus on improving code quality and resolving minor functional bugs within the core codebase.
kohana
OctagonAI/octagon-mcp-server
Mar 2025 - Jul 2026
An MCP server for public & prediction markets research. Ask natural-language questions and get structured, source-backed answers across SEC filings, earnings transcripts, company financials, stock & crypto market data, and prediction markets news & research. Built for investors, analysts, and researchers who need fast, cited intelligence.
Contributions:1 review, 4 PRs, 55 pushes in 1 year 4 months
cryptodebtearnings-callsequitiesfinancial-analysis
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