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About

Computer engineer building backend systems across legal, insurance, e‑commerce and AI products.

Ali Yılmaz
Download CV (PDF)

I live in Istanbul. I graduated in Computer Engineering from Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University in June 2026, and I'm a co-founder of Cesta Technology. I have built products across legal (CestaLex, CestaLaw), insurance (Insurceed), barter marketplaces (TradeHub), recipe recommendation (ChefsStack), travel (TravelMate) and task management (Taskify).

On the backend I use Java 21, Spring Boot, Kafka, Redis and PostgreSQL. My work covers microservice architectures, authentication (JWT, OAuth2), payment integrations (iyzico, Paraşüt), vector search (Qdrant, pgvector) and deployment with Docker and Kubernetes.

I write about AI and software on Medium. I've led teams in TÜBİTAK and TEKNOFEST competitions and served as an instructor and mentor for students at T3 Deneyap workshops.

Now

Finishing TradeHub's CI/CD pipeline and shipping it.

Expanding CestaLaw into new European jurisdictions.

Open to new collaborations and backend roles.

01

Experience

  1. 03/2026 – Present

    Istanbul

    Co-founder & Backend Engineer

    Cesta Technology ↗

    Company building AI-assisted case-law research for Turkish and European jurisdictions. I lead backend architecture across the product family and shipped all three properties to production.

    • Shipped CestaLex and CestaLaw to production; three properties live including the company site cestaai.com.
    • Designed the platform foundation both products share: multi-tenant isolation, layered authentication, event-driven communication over Kafka, and vector-based retrieval.
    • Built the payment pipeline with iyzico (subscription payments) and Paraşüt (e-arşiv invoicing); the flow from subscription to invoice needs no manual step.
    • Set up versioning and lifecycle policies on S3-compatible storage for law-firm document workloads.
    • Managed server infrastructure and multi-repo CI/CD pipelines on Kubernetes and Coolify, bringing an enterprise release down to a single pipeline run.
  2. 07/2025 – 09/2025

    Istanbul

    Software Engineering Intern

    Ada Software

    Designed the backend of a modular insurance platform on Spring Boot and defined the API contract consumed by the React/TypeScript team.

    • Architected a modular insurance platform following SOLID principles, structured for independent feature development.
    • Built JWT authentication across 4 microservices, eliminating session leaks and cutting token validation latency by 20ms.
    • Introduced a layered DTO/Mapper architecture with global exception handling, reducing average API response time by 30% under 1,000+ concurrent requests.
    • Delivered the REST APIs and error contract consumed by React/TypeScript frontends.
  3. Present →

02

Skills

Every item in this list has a counterpart in a live system.

Used in production

  • Java 21
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Security
  • Kafka
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • REST API
  • JWT & OAuth2
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Qdrant / pgvector
  • SQL
  • Git
  • CI/CD
  • Kubernetes

Familiar with

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Coolify
  • Nginx
  • Swagger / OpenAPI
  • Scikit-Learn

03

How I work

01

Security starts at the database layer

I don't leave authorization and data isolation to application code alone. I back them with database-level mechanisms such as PostgreSQL Row-Level Security and role-based access control.

02

Services communicate through events

Between microservices I use Kafka with the transactional outbox pattern, so state transitions are not lost and data stays consistent even when a service goes down.

03

Caching and asynchronous processing

I keep frequently read data in Redis and move long-running work such as AI model calls off the request path, which keeps response times predictable.

04

Measurable results

I track the effect of every technical decision with metrics such as response time, latency and accuracy. Every number on this site is tied to a specific design decision.

04

Education · Certificates

Education

B.S. Computer Engineering

Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University

Graduated June 2026

Languages

  • TurkishNative
  • EnglishB2

Leadership & writing

  • Co-founder, Cesta Technology
  • Team lead in TÜBİTAK and TEKNOFEST competitions
  • Medium lead at HSD FSMVU (Huawei Student Developers); ran the club's Medium publication
  • Medium Committee Lead, IEEE FSMVU Student Branch
  • Instructor and mentor for students at T3 Deneyap workshops
  • Writes about AI and software on Medium

Certificates

  1. 01

    Master Microservices with Spring Boot, Docker & Kubernetes

    Udemy

  2. 02

    Spring Boot 3 & Spring Framework 6

    Udemy

  3. 03

    Samsung Innovation Campus

    Samsung

  4. 04

    Huawei Cloud AI Bootcamp

    Huawei Türkiye

  5. 05

    HCCDA-Tech Essentials

    Huawei

  6. 06

    Advanced Java

    BTK Akademi

  7. 07

    SQL with Practical Applications

    BTK Akademi

  8. 08

    Git & GitHub Mastery

    Coursera

  9. 09

    Python Programming Language

    Turkcell

  10. 10

    Vision Camp

    GSB