Bilal Demir

Senior Software Engineer
Backend Specialist
Go, JavaScript, C#, PHP
Full-Stack & DevOps

Backend engineer based in Istanbul whose career has moved across stacks — from QA into .NET, PHP, JavaScript and most recently Go — shipping enterprise CMS projects alongside modern SaaS products and integrating almost everything in between (payments, CRM, DevOps tooling). What he likes thinking about: how lean a modern backend can actually be — his current project BlockNext is a multi-tenant AI workflow platform deliberately built without microservices, in-memory mediators or JVM-style overhead. Alongside his day job he keeps a steady side-project habit, from npm libraries and CLIs to full products like LumoDine and Ping. He graduated first in his faculty from Altinbas University (Management Information Systems), with prior degrees from Istanbul University and Bahcelievler Sehit Osman Yildiz Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School. In his free time he likes researching new things, going for a walk, and testing himself on HackerRank, Codewars and LeetCode.

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# Experience

Senior Software Engineer
12/2025 — Present · 10 mos
Owns the technical side of enterprise Drupal delivery end to end — architecture, backend, DevOps and client communication.
- Migrated 88 Drupal sites from Acquia Search to SearchStax in 6 hours with zero downtime, against an estimated 1.5-2 weeks by hand.
- Built the migration toolkit in TypeScript against SearchStax's undocumented API and Acquia Site Factory, and switched backends blue-green so rollback stayed a single config change.
- Cut Solr traffic from three requests per page view to one by dropping unused Views attachments and folding the load-more query into the first request.
- Added Cache-Control to Views AJAX endpoints so filtered results serve from Fastly, taking response time from 700ms-1.5s down to 30ms.
- Delivered the Drupal 11 upgrade across every site — removed unsupported modules and their config, ran database and config updates, and cleared each status report.
- Rolled out the Key module platform-wide, moving SearchStax Solr and analytics tokens into per-site key files outside the webroot, with migrations that create the files and switch each site over.
- Runs client-facing technical meetings, turning requirements into architecture proposals and delivery plans.
Senior Back-End Developer
01/2023 — 11/2025 · 2 yrs 11 mos
Moved from the .NET team into Drupal delivery, and owned CI/CD for both on GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines.
- Built and maintained enterprise sites for 20 brands, 14 of them Mars pet-care brands including Pedigree, Whiskas, Sheba and Iams — 7 on Drupal and Acquia, the rest on the older .NET estate.
- Tuned Cloudflare caching, raising cache hit ratio from 82% to 96% and cutting origin requests by roughly 78%.
- Migrated CDN delivery from Cloudflare to Fastly.
- Automated recurring Drupal and Acquia operations, bringing pipeline runtime down from 23 minutes to 5-9.
- Built the DDEV + WSL2 local development setup, cutting environment bootstrap from 30-40 minutes to 5 and first CMS load from 10 minutes to under 1.
- Developed custom blocks for WordPress builds.
- Worked day to day in cloud IDEs — GitHub Codespaces and Acquia Cloud IDE.
Back-End Developer
06/2017 — 12/2022 · 5 yrs 7 mos
Built and maintained .NET MVC applications for enterprise clients, wiring them to internal APIs and databases.
- Developed features with ASP.NET and .NET MVC on an agency portfolio of 150+ client sites, taking requests from per-brand and per-region (EU, US, Asia) stakeholder teams.
- Modelled and queried MSSQL and MySQL databases behind those applications.
- Built Salesforce and OneTrust API integrations.
- Integrated Bazaarvoice and Commerce Connector into commerce sites.
- Developed Sitecore themes and plugins.
- Automated recurring data processing jobs with Node.js.
- Set up AWS CodePipeline deployments and CDN delivery.
- Implemented technical SEO changes on client sites to specifications set by their SEO agencies.
- Presented delivered projects to clients and wrote the accompanying technical documentation.
Q/A Tester
08/2016 — 06/2017 · 11 mos
Tested client web projects before release and kept their content in sync.
- Ran end-user and UI/UX test cycles ahead of every release.
- Handled release-time data entry and content verification.
- Coordinated project tracking between developers and clients.

Senior Software Engineer
Freelance
Builds and runs a multi-tenant AI workflow platform in Go — backend, DevOps and cloud infrastructure.
- Designed and built a Go modular monolith on Domain-Driven Design, CQRS and hexagonal architecture.
- Developed a DAG-based workflow execution engine with parallel branch processing and a trigger/webhook lifecycle.
- Created a JSON Schema-first executor pattern compatible with LLM tool calling, function calling and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Built an MCP server that exposes workflows as callable tools for AI agents.
- Shipped 70+ workflow nodes across 24 third-party services spanning LLM providers, communication platforms, productivity suites and crypto data.
- Implemented multi-tenant infrastructure with organization-level RBAC, credential isolation, an OAuth framework and quota/credit accounting.
- Built subscription and billing flows over three payment providers — Stripe, Paddle and MetaMask, card and on-chain.
- Established Go coding standards and a repeatable module layout — DDD layering with CQRS handlers — that every new integration and module follows.
- Owned the full DevOps pipeline on Docker, nginx and AWS across dev and production environments.

DevOps Engineer
Freelance
Ran system administration and delivery automation for the whole organization.
- Migrated services from systemd units on Linux servers to Azure Kubernetes, delivered by GitHub Actions and ArgoCD from a dedicated DevOps repository.
- Containerised every service except the legacy ASP.NET application, removing manual release steps.
- Ran day-to-day operations across dev and production — DNS, backups, access control and cluster health.

Full Stack Developer
Freelance
Built web products end to end for an early-stage startup.
- Created REST APIs with PHP and .NET Core.
- Developed interactive front-ends with Node.js, Vue.js and vanilla JavaScript.
- Shipped car-park products wired to three bank payment gateways — Halkbank, Vakifbank and Yapi Kredi.
- Set up Cloudflare DNS, TLS and caching for the company domains.
- Built Discord bots for community moderation and reporting.

# Skills

Backend

Go
C# (.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC)
PHP
Node.js

AI

LLM integration (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini)
Tool & function calling
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Workflow orchestration

Infrastructure & DevOps

Docker
Docker Swarm
Kubernetes (AKS)
ArgoCD
AWS
Cloudflare
Fastly
nginx
GitHub Actions
Azure Pipelines
Grafana & Prometheus
Server management

Data

PostgreSQL
MSSQL
MySQL
MongoDB
Solr (SearchStax)

Frontend

JavaScript
TypeScript
React
Next.js
Vue.js
Vite
Tailwind CSS
CSS (SCSS)

CMS

Drupal (Acquia)
WordPress

# Projects

BlockNext

Open-source no-code platform for building and running AI-powered workflows — the self-hostable community edition, with a drag-and-drop builder, a DAG execution engine and MCP support. Runs on roughly 100 MB of RAM without a Redis dependency.

Go
React
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Docker
MCP

GitHub

LumoDine

QR menu platform for restaurants — multi-tenant menu management, media handling and public menu delivery, split across dashboard, API and menu services.

Next.js
Node.js
Fastify
MongoDB
AWS S3
Tailwind CSS

GitHub

Ping

Watches the packages a team depends on and notifies them the moment a release lands in their semver range — any registry, private ones included, with organizations and role-based access. Self-hostable on one Postgres database and three small Go binaries.

Go
Fiber
PostgreSQL
Docker

Cloudflare Percent Cached

Command-line tool that reports the cache hit ratio of Cloudflare zones, for a single domain or a CSV of many.

Node.js
Cloudflare API

GitHub

GitHub Secrets Editor

Web app for managing GitHub Actions secrets across many repositories at once.

Next.js
GitHub API
Tailwind CSS
shadcn/ui

GitHub

Acquia CLI Azure Pipelines Integration

Azure Pipelines integration built on Acquia CLI, replacing BLT ahead of its end of life.

Drupal
Acquia CLI
Azure Pipelines
Drush

GitHub

Drupal Local Development

DDEV + WSL2 setup that makes Drupal local development on Windows an order of magnitude faster.

Drupal
DDEV
WSL2
Acquia CLI

GitHub

Express Dynamic Router Creator

Express library that loads routes from the file tree instead of manual imports.

Node.js
Express
JavaScript

Mass Veranda Calculator

Multilingual quote calculator for a manufacturer — per-product question sets drive the resulting price offer.

WordPress Plugin
Elementor
Polylang
JavaScript

Earlier work: Icevers · Mass Veranda · GitHub Actions collection · WordPress AMP Cache Update Plugin · aspnet-rsa256-jwt · Owl Search · Ivs Slider · Personalization.js · Basic Intro JS · Time Calculator · 3D Teeth/Jaw Model Viewer · Eminonu Map · Genjitsu Ban Discord Bot · Sut Annem · Car Park Payment Websites · Car Park Management System