Issues that end the debate
Every finding comes with the details and a cause-and-effect chain, so it gets picked up — not argued about in next week’s meeting.
Available for consulting
Istanbul, Türkiye · UTC+3 · EN / TR
Sevimli
Senior DevOps Engineer & R&D Team Lead @ Vendor Box
I build CI/CD, Kubernetes platforms and monitoring that run themselves — secure by default, written down as code, and quiet at 3 a.m.
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01 · About
I’d rather describe a system than build it by hand. Infrastructure is code, every change goes through a pull request, and a good system tells you it’s broken before anyone else does — then fixes what it can on its own.
I’ve worked in DevOps and DevSecOps since 2019, including two years of security-focused QA, across Kubernetes operations, cloud platforms, MLOps and RAG systems. Today I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer and the R&D Team Lead at Vendor Box, and I consult for İVEN Bilişim. After hours I build minderhq, a self-hosted AI platform I first imagined in 2023 while working on Monitra. A home lab tests all of it and feeds this site’s lab journal.
I wrote my first website in Notepad for a free 10 MB host while still in primary education, Pascal and cybersecurity forums in high school, assembly at university, where I also ran the department’s lab. A guitar pulled me into sound recording and a studio in Kadıköy; one good-sounding digital processor pulled me back to software. I taught myself Linux, which led me to Hackerspace Istanbul; later I helped found two university labs, Sparkgo and BAU Future Lab, an IoT lab funded with Intel’s support.
Now
- →Taking minderhq to its first public release
- →Consulting for İVEN Bilişim on software and DevSecOps
- →Running a home lab that updates itself every night — and rolls back when it shouldn’t have
- →Writing this site: CV, lab journal and AI-summarized news
02 · Featured work
Product
minderhq
Run LLMs, RAG and knowledge graphs on your own hardware. Plugins, a marketplace and one installer.
Infrastructure as codehomelab
One Proxmox node, 11 containers — 8 services and 3 CI runners — nightly self-updates behind snapshots, backups and phone alerts, all from one repo.
This siteusevimli.dev
Bilingual and static, built with Astro. Every morning an n8n workflow at home summarizes the news with GLM and commits it here.
03 · Work with me
Let’s make your infrastructure run itself.
Consulting and hands-on delivery, in whatever shape fits: a one-off audit, a fixed-scope build or ongoing support — held to the same standards as the production systems I run.
How I work
Code, not clicks
What I set up is written down as code and reviewed, so you can rebuild it without me.
Leaner every time
I take things away before I add: fewer moving parts, easier installs, updates that apply themselves.
- 01
CI/CD & DevSecOps
Pipelines with security built in: GitLab CI or GitHub Actions on your own runners, signed images, a private registry with vulnerability scans.
- 02
Kubernetes & platforms
K3s or Kubernetes with Argo CD and Helm, on Proxmox or in the cloud — a platform your team can ship to without asking anyone.
- 03
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana and alerts that matter, straight to your phone — so you hear about problems before your users do.
- 04
Self-hosted AI
LLMs and RAG on your own hardware, with answers that cite their sources — plus n8n automations that keep your data in-house.
- 05
Small office & homelab servers
A server that runs itself: Proxmox, backups, UPS and remote access, defined as code.
04 · Experience
- Nov 2024 — now
Senior DevOps Engineer & R&D Team Lead · Vendor Box
Remote
Two roles at once. As Senior DevOps Engineer I take care of the platform’s infrastructure and delivery; as R&D Team Lead I lead the team that decides what we build next.
- A fully autonomous, Jira-integrated delivery pipeline, with separate test and production environments
- Docker and Kubernetes environments, infrastructure as code with Ansible; monitoring, logging and access control
- Oct 2026 — now
Software developer & DevSecOps consultant · İVEN Bilişim ve Ar-Ge
External · remote · Technoscope, Mersin University Technopark
Alongside Vendor Box: I build software and advise on secure, automated delivery for an R&D company working in software, chemistry and recycling.
- 2026 — now
Founder · R&D project lead · RAG core engineer · minderhq
Own product · idea since 2023
A self-hosted, local-first AI platform: LLMs, RAG pipelines and knowledge graphs on your own hardware, extended through a public plugin ecosystem. The idea took shape in 2023, while I was working on MLOps and RAG for Monitra; in 2026 it became a product — and an R&D project I lead as its technical architect and RAG core engineer.
- Experiment design and hypotheses; technical architecture; validating models, hardware and security before the pilot
- RAG module contracts, reference pipelines and adapters, compared in controlled experiments
- Budget-aware method selection driven by each document’s profile
- Fully offline operation, an installer, security regression tests, and checks that answers cite their sources — or abstain
- 10+ containerized services, signed images from a private registry, CI on my own amd64 and arm64 runners
- Jul 2024 — Nov 2024
Cloud & DevOps Engineer · Servicepark
Istanbul · hybrid
Took over Monitorpark, a product whose old version had been left unmaintained, and rebuilt it into a much leaner one that is far easier to install and keeps itself up to date.
- Cloud infrastructure end to end: CI/CD, container-based deployments, monitoring and backups
- Feb 2023 — Mar 2024
DevOps & DevSecOps Engineer · iSIMPlatform
Informatics Valley, Gebze · hybrid
Built a secure CI/CD platform and the DevSecOps practices around it.
- GitLab, Harbor, Argo CD and K3s on Proxmox, monitored with InfluxDB and Grafana
- Monitra: worked on the MLOps processes and contributed to the RAG-based systems
- Jan 2021 — Feb 2023
Software QA Engineer · iSIMPlatform
Informatics Valley, Gebze · hybrid
Test automation with Selenium and JMeter, DevSecOps-oriented security testing, and test environments on Jenkins, Docker and Kubernetes.
- Jul 2019 — Dec 2020
DevOps Engineer · Proline Integrated Intelligence
Istanbul
My first DevOps role, at a time when DevSecOps was barely a job title — which made me the friendly nightmare of the DevOps and R&D teams. My issues came with every detail and a cause-and-effect chain that left nothing to argue about, so teams picked them up instead of debating them in weekly meetings. Product quality and process quality both went up.
- Deployment and infrastructure automation with Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes and Ansible
- Mar 2016 — Feb 2017
R&D Project Engineer · Smartoject Innovation Center
Freelance · hybrid
Hardware projects with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Linux and Python — and the schedules that kept interdisciplinary projects on track.
Earlier · 3
- 2015 — 2018Student Administrative Assistant · Bahçeşehir University
- 2011 — 2012Intern · Türk Telekom
- 2009Field Specialist · Frekans Bilişim
05 · Roots
Built things before I deployed them.
Long before pipelines and clusters there was Notepad, a guitar and a lot of labs: a vocational high school’s, a university lab I ran, a recording studio, Linux learned from online communities, a hackerspace, and two labs I helped found. They taught me to build, to lead a team, and to explain technical work to people who don’t do it.
Primary education · HTML · Notepad
A first website
My first website was hand-written HTML, typed in Notepad and uploaded to the free 10 MB of hosting cjb.net gave away back then.
until 2007 · Electronics · Pascal · security forums
Şişli Vocational and Technical High School
I wrote Pascal, spent hours on cybersecurity forums trying to learn whatever I could, picked up the guitar, and sat in on the senior classes’ lab lessons of my own accord, helping the older students along the way — the earliest training of my R&D instincts and hands-on skills, under my lab teacher Oğuz Kaan Bozkuş.
2007 — 2011 · Electronics & communication · lab lead
Marmara University
I was an evening-programme student, but my days started early in the lab: as assistant to our department coordinator, Uğur Kesen, and the person responsible for the department’s laboratory, I set up the labs and supported the instructors teaching there. This is also where I learned assembly.
2009 — 2011 · Sound recording · repairs
A music studio in Kadıköy
The guitar pulled me into recording technology. In parallel with university — sometimes at the expense of my evening classes — I worked at a music studio in Kadıköy. I helped musicians through both kinds of sessions: multitrack recordings, with a microphone on every instrument, and live takes of the whole band captured by microphones set up in the middle of the room. I also repaired the studio’s gear.
Until then I had lived by Serdar Öztop’s line, “digital should have its limits.” Then a digital processor landed on my bench that simply sounded good — and I realized it was time to leave that line behind and focus on software.
2011 — 2013 · Pardus 2011 · online communities
Linux, self-taught
After the studio I turned to Linux and set out to learn it on my own. It started with a Pardus 2011 DVD, mailed out for the price of shipping — the beginning of my focus on Linux. From there I joined online communities, asked questions and dug through everything I could find. That search is what led me to Hackerspace Istanbul.
2013 — 2015 · Linux · cybersecurity · PCB design
Hackerspace Istanbul
A two-way exchange. The community deepened my Linux and took the security I had picked up on forums much further; in return I helped with PCB design and with improving their hackathon projects. I attended their trainings and later took on roles in running them.
2013 — 2019 · Electrical & electronics · graduate labs
Bahçeşehir University
My degree years were lab years. Rather than go home and come back early for lab work before classes, I often just stayed in the lab. At night, to keep busy, I sat in on master’s courses and helped the lecturers run the hands-on sessions of their big data and Linux classes for graduate students. Another lab, another reason to stay.
2015 — 2018 · First lab · funded by the university
Sparkgo
The first lab I helped found, funded by Bahçeşehir University. Sparkgo gave student science and technology projects a stage the school could proudly show — and taught me how to tell the story of technical work.
2015 — 2018 · IoT lab · funded with Intel’s support
BAU Future Lab
Next came BAU Future Lab, funded with Intel’s support — and this was the hands-on one. We built real IoT projects on embedded boards, sensors and Linux, and learned what it takes to make connected devices work outside a demo.
Education & training
- 2013 — 2019B.Sc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering · Bahçeşehir University
- 2007 — 2011Associate degree, Electronics and Communication · Marmara University
- 2007Electronics, vocational high school · Şişli Vocational and Technical High School
- 2022Secure Software Development and Software Security Architecture · ADEO
- 2022AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials · Amazon Web Services
- 2022AWS Technical Essentials · Amazon Web Services
- 2021Fully Managed Communication Platform: Azure Communication Services · TR AI Week 2021 · Microsoft Türkiye (Mehmet Kut)
06 · Lab
A home lab that runs itself
One Proxmox node, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi and a UPS. Everything is defined as code, updates itself every night and rolls itself back when something breaks.
Inside the lab →07 · Systems
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- K3s
- Helm
- Traefik
- GitLab CI
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- Argo CD
- Harbor
- Ansible
- Terraform
- Renovate
- n8n
- LDAP
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- InfluxDB
- Alertmanager
- Proxmox VE
- VMware ESXi
- LXC
- Debian Linux
- Python
- Bash
- Node.js
- Java
- DevSecOps
- Selenium
- JMeter
- Postman
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Qdrant
- RAG · MLOps
- Embedded systems
- PCB design
- Raspberry Pi
- Arduino
08 · Contact
Say hello.
A pipeline that needs fixing, a platform to build, or a second pair of eyes on your infrastructure — tell me what you are working on.
hello@usevimli.devBased in Istanbul · UTC+3 · works remotely English · Turkish