Co-founder & CTO — backend & DevOps lead · 2024 → now
Postgradia
A coaching platform where coaches, students and parents work from the same weekly plan.
1,000+teachers on the platform
- NestJS
- TypeScript
- MikroORM
Currently at NaylaLabs
Melih Kızmaz
Backend & DevOps Engineer, Technical Product Manager
I build reliable backend systems and the platforms they run on — and lately, the infrastructure that lets AI agents work safely in production.
Samsun, Türkiye
Ahmet Melih Kızmaz
Backend & DevOps Engineer · Technical Product Manager
- Current role
- Backend & DevOps Engineer · Technical Product Manager at NaylaLabs
- Education
- B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering · Ondokuz Mayıs University
- Languages
- Turkish (native), English
- Location
- Samsun, Türkiye
About
Engineer by training, backend and DevOps by choice
I’m Ahmet Melih Kızmaz, a software engineer from Balıkesir, living in Samsun, Türkiye. I studied mechanical engineering and spent three years in quality control and production planning in the defence industry before moving into software in 2021.
Since then I’ve been part of the team building the infrastructure of a Canadian bank, and built backend services for product teams and a developer-productivity startup. With friends, I built a product for running student-coaching programmes and we founded a company around it. Today I work at NaylaLabs as a backend & DevOps engineer and technical product manager.
I care about the parts of software nobody sees but everybody feels: APIs that don’t break, deployments that are boringly safe, and monitoring that tells the truth.
Lately most of my attention has moved to AI agents. Connecting agents to tools and systems, evaluating their behaviour (evals), observing them, and drawing their cost and safety boundaries is what separates an agent that works in a demo from one that runs reliably in production. I write about what I learn and try in this area.
Focus
Backend, platform engineering, observability, AI agents in production
Experience
Where I’ve worked
From mechanical engineering to backend, platform and product — in reverse order.
2025 →
Backend & DevOps Engineer · Technical Product Manager
NaylaLabs
- Build and maintain the company’s backend services.
- Own the CI/CD pipelines and the Kubernetes clusters the services run on.
- Run the observability stack, so problems are visible and diagnosable — at 3 a.m. too.
- As technical product manager, shape the roadmap of one of NaylaLabs’ products.
- Run the team’s planning and delivery rhythm, from priorities to releases.
2024 →
Co-founder & CTO
Bitnodia
- Co-founded Bitnodia and led engineering for Postgradia, an education platform for coaches, students and parents.
- Shipped a NestJS API, a React web app and a React Native mobile app end to end.
- Set up CI/CD, containerised deployments and production monitoring.
2023 – 2025
Software Engineer
iftrue
- Built Fastify and NestJS services for a developer-productivity product based on DORA and SPACE metrics.
- Ran the platform underneath with Kubernetes and Helm — including on-prem installs inside enterprise customers’ own clusters.
- Set up centralised logging and observability with Promtail, Loki and Grafana.
2021 – 2022
Backend Developer
Glance Capital
- Built backend services for a Canadian bank’s web and mobile apps.
- Worked under real security and performance requirements of a regulated industry.
2021 – 2022
Backend Developer
Bordo
- Built backend features for product teams with Node.js, NestJS and GraphQL.
- Designed data models on MongoDB and PostgreSQL.
Before
Mechanical Engineer
Defence industry
- Three years in quality control and production planning in the defence industry.
- Learned the habit I still build software with: measure first, then trust.
Education
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering
Ondokuz Mayıs University
Skills
What I work with
The tools and practices I use day to day, grouped by area.
Backend
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- NestJS
- Fastify
- GraphQL
- REST APIs
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Prisma
DevOps & Cloud
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- CI/CD
- GCP
- Azure
- Cloudflare
Observability
- OpenTelemetry
- Grafana
- Loki
- Promtail
- Tracing
- SLOs & burn-rate alerts
AI & MCP
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- AI agents in production
- OpenTelemetry GenAI
- Idempotent tool design
- Agent identity & delegation
Product
- Roadmapping
- Planning & delivery
- Distributed teams
- Co-founder / CTO experience
Projects
Products I’ve built and shipped
End to end: the architecture, the code and the pipeline that ships it. Each one has a case study — who it’s for, what I built, the decisions that mattered and how it fits together.
Solo — product, design implementation, backend, infra · 2026
Pulse
Status pages with real SLOs: uptime checks from three regions, a DOWN only when a quorum agrees, and error budgets with multi-window burn-rate alerts.
0false DOWN incidents — 30 simulated days, 20% single-region failures
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- D1 (SQLite)
Solo — product, design implementation, backend, infra · 2026
Gişe
Seat-map ticketing for small theatres, stand-up clubs and concert halls in Türkiye — where no seat is ever sold twice.
0seats sold twice — 2,000 buyers raced for 120
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- D1 (SQLite)
Solo — product, design implementation, backend, infra · 2026
Tahsil
Receivables and collections for Turkish SMBs: customer ledgers, invoices, polite reminder sequences, pay-by-link and reconciliation — on a double-entry ledger that always balances.
0payments applied twice — 11,619 webhook deliveries
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- D1 (SQLite)
Solo — product, design implementation, backend, infra · 2026
Masa
QR menu, table ordering, a kitchen display, a waiter tablet and an owner admin for independent cafés and restaurants in Türkiye.
0 / 0lost / duplicate orders through 535 connection drops
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- D1 (SQLite)
Sole engineer — architecture, backend, storefront, admin, infra · 2026
3dfilamentci
An e-commerce platform for 3D printers, filament, resin and spare parts — built from scratch for a specialist shop.
200+test files, 40 of them end-to-end
- NestJS 12
- TypeScript
- TypeORM
Sole engineer — product, backend, frontend, Cloudflare · 2026
Mentor Z
A coaching panel that replaced a stack of per-grade Excel workbooks — running entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier.
$0a month to host — all on the free tier
- Hono
- TypeScript
- Cloudflare Workers
Solo — design, code, policies, publishing · 2026
Hockey Pick’em & Sub Pulse
Two apps on Reddit’s Developer Platform: a free-to-play hockey prediction game, and a weekly health report with alerts for moderators.
33test files across the two apps
- Devvit Web
- Reddit API
- Scheduler
iOS apps on the App Store
Two journaling apps I built in SwiftUI and shipped in April 2026, synced across devices through iCloud.
Coffee journal · Apr 2026
BeanDiary
iPhone · iOS 16+ · Free, with in-app purchases
A coffee journal for iPhone: log a brew in under 30 seconds, keep track of your beans and watch your taste profile take shape.
- 11 brew methods and 24 flavor notes, with a rating and photos for every cup
- Beans grouped by roaster and origin, each with its average rating and brew history
- Stats on brew methods, origins, acidity, body and sweetness
- Premium adds iCloud sync, CSV export and share cards; the app speaks 7 languages
SwiftUI · Core Data + CloudKit · StoreKit 2
Whiskey journal · Apr 2026
CaskDiary
iPhone · iOS 16+ · Free, with in-app purchases
A whiskey tasting journal for iPhone: log a dram in under a minute, build your aroma profile and see what your collection cost.
- 9 whiskey types, with distillery, age, ABV, cask finish and region
- 40+ aroma notes in 7 groups; nose, palate and finish noted separately
- Favorites, “would buy again” and stats on types, distilleries and price vs rating
- Premium adds an aroma wheel, iCloud sync and CSV export; the app speaks 7 languages
SwiftUI · Core Data + CloudKit · StoreKit 2
Freelance web
Small, fast sites for local businesses and independent professionals.
FF Mühendislik2026
Bilingual (TR/EN), SEO-first corporate site for a high-precision CNC manufacturer — static HTML on Cloudflare’s free plan.
React 19 · Vite SSG · Tailwind CSS · Cloudflare
ffmuhendislik.trDietician Elif Arslan Özmen2026
A dietician’s practice site with a blog — a static Next.js export.
Next.js · MDX · Tailwind CSS
diyetisyenelifarslan.comAraç Kontrol Kalemi2025
Product landing page for a 12 V car fuse and circuit tester.
Next.js · Tailwind CSS
arabasigortakontrolkalemi.comMori Filament2026
Single-page brand site for a Turkish 3D-printer filament maker — a Three.js spool in the hero, production and packaging story, and an inquiry form instead of a shop. Static Vite + TypeScript.
Vite · TypeScript · Three.js · Playwright
morifilament.comRabia Kaya · Education Coach2026
SEO-first site for an education coach in Samsun: LGS/YKS coaching and district landing pages, a guide (blog), FAQ, and a built-in exam-analysis tool that turns tables pasted from Excel into branded charts. Static Astro on Cloudflare Pages.
Astro · Cloudflare Pages · JSON-LD · Charts
rabiakaya.com
Writing
Writing
A five-part series on what changes in backend and DevOps infrastructure when the caller is an AI agent.
Series · 5 parts
Agent-Native Operations
- Part 01Stateless MCP servers in production with NestJSWhat removing sessions from the MCP spec changes for load balancing, auth, retries and caching — measured.12 min read · NaylaLabs ↗
- Part 02Designing retry-safe MCP tool contractsIdempotency keys, handles, error shapes an agent can act on, and the token bill your schema runs up.11 min read · NaylaLabs ↗
- Part 03Giving AI agents an identity on your developer platformWhy service accounts are the wrong abstraction and delegation is the unit of identity.10 min read · NaylaLabs ↗
- Part 04Instrumenting agents with OpenTelemetry GenAI in Node.jsA facade that survives convention renames, the span tree an agent run should emit, and its measured overhead.10 min read · NaylaLabs ↗
- Part 05When auto-remediation makes the incident biggerFour failure patterns, a state machine with the two states vendors skip, and a blast-radius matrix.11 min read · NaylaLabs ↗
Lab
Lab — small interactive explainers
Most of my day-to-day work is company-internal, so I rebuilt some of its core mechanisms as small simulations. Each one runs right in your browser.
Auto-remediation simulator
Self-Healing, With Brakes
Break a small cluster and watch a remediation controller fix it — until its guardrails decide a human should.
- Auto-remediation
- Policy gate
- Kubernetes model
OpenTelemetry GenAI trace viewer
Watching an Agent Think
Run an AI agent against flaky tools and see every span, retry and idempotent replay drawn as it happens.
- OpenTelemetry GenAI
- Idempotency keys
- AI agents
Load-balancing & autoscaling lab
Stateless Under Load
Push traffic at sticky and stateless MCP servers side by side and watch hot spots, scaling and p95 latency diverge.
- MCP
- Load balancing
- Autoscaling
Rate-limiting lab
Token Bucket Arcade
Hammer one API through three rate limiters at once and watch a fixed window get gamed, a sliding window hold the line and a token bucket soak up the burst.
- Token bucket
- Sliding window
- Redis
Progressive delivery simulator
Canary Release
Roll v2 out to 1% → 5% → 25% → 100% of traffic, slip a bug into it, and watch automated burn-rate analysis halt the rollout before most users notice.
- Progressive delivery
- SLO burn rate
- Rollback
Message-queue & autoscaling lab
Queue Under Pressure
Flood a bounded queue with producers, starve or scale its consumers, and watch lag, backpressure, retries, poison messages and the dead-letter queue play out.
- Backpressure
- Dead-letter queue
- Autoscaling
Circuit-breaker & retry-storm simulator
Trip the Breaker
Make a downstream API fail and watch naive retries turn it into a storm — then let a circuit breaker go Closed → Open → Half-open and save it.
- Circuit breaker
- Retries & jitter
- Timeouts
Consistent-hashing playground
The Hash Ring
Add and remove cache nodes and count how many keys move under hash % N, a consistent-hash ring and virtual nodes — then watch one celebrity key melt a node anyway.
- Consistent hashing
- Virtual nodes
- Caching
Kubernetes scheduler simulator
Pod Tetris
Watch kube-scheduler filter, score and bind pods onto nodes like falling blocks — with taints, affinity, a node dying and the cluster autoscaler to the rescue. Or drag the pods yourself.
- Kubernetes
- Scheduling
- Cluster autoscaler
Contact
Let’s talk
Open to conversations about backend, DevOps and platform roles, technical product work, or anything in this portfolio. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
Prefer something more playful?
The same portfolio, as a tiny 3D planet you can walk around — with a bike and a radio.
Explore the 3D planet3D · sound · ~3 MB · best on desktop