Saner Cakir
| Saner Cakir | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, software executive |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder of Outship |
Saner Cakir is a technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of Outship, a recruiting technology company that enables employers to evaluate software engineers based on how they use artificial intelligence tools during the coding process. Outship is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and is based in San Francisco.[1]
Career
Cakir co-founded Outship to address changes in software engineering hiring brought about by the widespread adoption of AI-assisted coding tools. The company's premise is that, as tools such as Claude Code and Cursor become standard in software development, the ability to write code from scratch is no longer the primary differentiator among engineering candidates. Instead, the signal for identifying strong engineers lies in the process—how candidates decompose problems, direct AI agents, make architectural tradeoffs, and recover when things go wrong.
Outship provides a cloud-based recruiting platform where engineering candidates complete coding tasks in a pre-configured workspace. The platform handles environment setup and secret management to ensure a consistent testing ground across candidates. During the assessment, Outship captures and analyzes both the candidate's process—including their interactions with AI coding assistants—and the final code output. This allows hiring managers to evaluate candidates on a broader range of skills than traditional coding assessments typically measure.[2]
The company operates in the artificial intelligence, business-to-business (B2B), and recruiting sectors. According to Outship's public communications, the platform has been adopted by several fast-growing Y Combinator companies for their engineering hiring processes.[1]
Prior to Outship, Cakir served as founder and CEO of Trace, a company that developed AI platforms for the financial services sector. At Trace, the company built AI-powered customer support agents designed for banks, insurance companies, and fintech firms, with an emphasis on security and reliability in high-stakes interactions.
Cakir maintains a public presence on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter), where he discusses developments in AI-assisted software engineering and recruiting.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Outship – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Outship". 'Outship}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.