# Melih Kızmaz (Ahmet Melih Kızmaz)

> Melih Kızmaz is a backend and DevOps engineer and technical product manager from Türkiye. He builds NestJS services, runs Kubernetes platforms and writes about agent-native operations.

Location: Samsun, Türkiye. Also written as: Melih Kizmaz, Ahmet Melih Kizmaz, melihkizmaz.
Education: B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, Ondokuz Mayıs University. Languages: Turkish (native), English.
Contact: melihkizmaz@icloud.com
Turkish version of this site: https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr
Homepage (https://melihkizmaz.dev/, https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr): plain HTML with all the content below. The same content as an interactive 3D tiny planet (WebGL, ~3 MB): https://melihkizmaz.dev/planet (https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr/planet).

## Experience
- 2026 → — Backend & DevOps Engineer, NaylaLabs: Backend services, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters and the observability around them.
- 2026 → — Technical Product Manager, Türkiye ⇄ Romania product team: Roadmap, team rhythm and delivery for a product built across two countries — while still shipping code.
- 2024 → — Co-founder & CTO, Bitnodia: Led the build of Postgradia end to end: NestJS API, React web app, React Native mobile app, CI/CD, containers and production monitoring.
- 2023 – 2025 — Software Engineer, iftrue: Fastify and NestJS services for a developer-productivity product built on DORA and SPACE metrics; Kubernetes with Helm, on-prem enterprise installs, Promtail → Loki → Grafana.
- 2021 – 2022 — Backend Developer, Glance Capital: Backend for a Canadian bank’s web and mobile apps.
- 2021 – 2022 — Backend Developer, Bordo: Node.js, NestJS, GraphQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL for product teams.
- Before — Mechanical Engineer, Defence industry: Three years of quality control and production planning.

Tools: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, Fastify, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, GCP, Azure, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, MCP.

## Projects (case studies)
- [Postgradia](https://melihkizmaz.dev/projects/postgradia) — Co-founder & CTO — backend & DevOps lead (2024 → now, live): A coaching platform where coaches, students and parents work from the same weekly plan. Stack: NestJS, TypeScript, MikroORM, PostgreSQL, CASL, Passport · JWT, Swagger, React Email, React Router 7, TanStack Query, shadcn/ui, Expo, React Native, Next.js, Azure AKS, Helm, ingress-nginx, cert-manager, External Secrets, Static Web Apps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Docker, LemonSqueezy, AWS S3, Expo push, SMS & e-mail providers, Sentry. Live product: https://www.postgradia.com Turkish: https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr/projects/postgradia
- [3dfilamentci](https://melihkizmaz.dev/projects/3dfilamentci) — Sole engineer — architecture, backend, storefront, admin, infra (2026, delivered): An e-commerce platform for 3D printers, filament, resin and spare parts — built from scratch for a specialist shop. Stack: NestJS 12, TypeScript, TypeORM, PostgreSQL 18, Redis, BullMQ, OpenAPI, Next.js (App Router), React, Vite, Playwright, Docker Compose, Caddy, imgproxy, GitHub Actions, GHCR, Turborepo, pnpm, PayTR, Bank transfer, Excel import, JSON-LD ProductGroup. Turkish: https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr/projects/3dfilamentci
- [Mentor Z](https://melihkizmaz.dev/projects/mentor-z) — Sole engineer — product, backend, frontend, Cloudflare (2026, live): A coaching panel that replaced a stack of per-grade Excel workbooks — running entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier. Stack: Hono, TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, D1 (SQLite), Drizzle ORM, Cron Triggers, React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Vitest (Workers runtime), Miniflare, jsdom, tsc project references. Public site: https://meetmentorz.com Turkish: https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr/projects/mentor-z
- [Hockey Pick’em & Sub Pulse](https://melihkizmaz.dev/projects/reddit-apps) — Solo — design, code, policies, publishing (2026, live): Two apps on Reddit’s Developer Platform: a free-to-play hockey prediction game, and a weekly health report with alerts for moderators. Stack: Devvit Web, Reddit API, Scheduler, Redis, TypeScript, React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Vitest, ESLint. Reddit listing: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/hockey-pickem Policies: https://melihkizmaz.github.io/devvit-policies/ Turkish: https://melihkizmaz.dev/tr/projects/reddit-apps

### Freelance web
- FF Mühendislik (2026): Bilingual (TR/EN), SEO-first corporate site for a high-precision CNC manufacturer — static HTML on Cloudflare’s free plan. https://ffmuhendislik.tr
- Dietician Elif Arslan Özmen (2026): A dietician’s practice site with a blog — a static Next.js export. https://diyetisyenelifarslan.com
- Araç Kontrol Kalemi (2025): Product landing page for a 12 V car fuse and circuit tester. https://arabasigortakontrolkalemi.com
- Rabia Kaya · Education Coach toolkit (2026): A design system and tool that turns exam tables pasted from Excel into clean, branded charts for a coach’s videos.

## Lab — small interactive explainers (run in the browser)
- [Self-Healing, With Brakes](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/self-healing): Auto-remediation simulator. Break a small cluster and watch a remediation controller fix it — until its guardrails decide a human should.
- [Watching an Agent Think](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/agent-trace): OpenTelemetry GenAI trace viewer. Run an AI agent against flaky tools and see every span, retry and idempotent replay drawn as it happens.
- [Stateless Under Load](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/stateless-scaling): Load-balancing & autoscaling lab. Push traffic at sticky and stateless MCP servers side by side and watch hot spots, scaling and p95 latency diverge.
- [Token Bucket Arcade](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/rate-limiter): Rate-limiting lab. 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.
- [Canary Release](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/canary-deploy): Progressive delivery simulator. 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.
- [Queue Under Pressure](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/queue-backpressure): Message-queue & autoscaling lab. 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.
- [Trip the Breaker](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/circuit-breaker): Circuit-breaker & retry-storm simulator. 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.
- [The Hash Ring](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/consistent-hashing): Consistent-hashing playground. 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.
- [Pod Tetris](https://melihkizmaz.dev/lab/k8s-scheduler): Kubernetes scheduler simulator. 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.

## Writing — Agent-Native Operations
Backend and DevOps infrastructure was designed around a quiet assumption: the caller is a human. AI agents break that in production. A five-part series, one mechanism at a time, every post carrying a number we measured ourselves.
Originally published on the NaylaLabs blog (naylalabs.com/blog).
- [Stateless MCP servers in production with NestJS](https://naylalabs.com/en/blog/stateless-mcp-server-production-nestjs): What removing sessions from the MCP spec changes for load balancing, auth, retries and caching — measured.
- [Designing retry-safe MCP tool contracts](https://naylalabs.com/en/blog/designing-mcp-tool-contracts): Idempotency keys, handles, error shapes an agent can act on, and the token bill your schema runs up.
- [Giving AI agents an identity on your developer platform](https://naylalabs.com/en/blog/ai-agent-identity-developer-platform): Why service accounts are the wrong abstraction and delegation is the unit of identity.
- [Instrumenting agents with OpenTelemetry GenAI in Node.js](https://naylalabs.com/en/blog/opentelemetry-genai-nodejs): A facade that survives convention renames, the span tree an agent run should emit, and its measured overhead.
- [When auto-remediation makes the incident bigger](https://naylalabs.com/en/blog/auto-remediation-guardrails): Four failure patterns, a state machine with the two states vendors skip, and a blast-radius matrix.

### Turkish
- [NestJS ile production’da stateless MCP server](https://naylalabs.com/blog/mcp-server-production-nestjs)
- [Agent’lara API tasarlamak: retry’a dayanıklı MCP tool contract’ları](https://naylalabs.com/blog/mcp-tool-contracts)
- [AI agent’lara internal developer platform’da kimlik vermek](https://naylalabs.com/blog/agent-identity-developer-platform)
- [Node.js’te OpenTelemetry GenAI ile agent izlemek](https://naylalabs.com/blog/opentelemetry-genai-nodejs)
- [Auto-remediation incident’ı ne zaman büyütür](https://naylalabs.com/blog/auto-remediation-guardrails)

Demo repository for the series: https://github.com/melihkizmaz/agent-native-ops-demo

## Elsewhere
- GitHub: https://github.com/melihkizmaz
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihkizmaz/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melihkizmazz/
- Email: melihkizmaz@icloud.com