Mert Celik
Mert Celik
About
Detail
Head of Engineering
Estonia
I've spent 10 years in SDKs and platform engineering. Started by building ad-tech SDKs handling 250M+ monthly requests. Now I run engineering for identity verification at Veriff, where my teams build the SDKs and APIs that 1000+ companies integrate against.
Three things I'm focused on right now:
1. How AI coding agents actually change engineering organizations. Not the hype, the operating model. I ran a 10-engineer pilot with Claude Code, measured PR throughput uplift, and watched the gap close when the rest of the org adopted AI assistance. The bottleneck moved to repo readiness and context quality. The work now is infrastructure: a five-layer agentic framework (trigger, context, runtime, output, human gate), an internal plugin marketplace for 100+ engineers, and agent-ready repo standards enforced through Backstage.
2. SDK and platform architecture at the boundary between customer speed and product quality. That includes SDK architecture, integration APIs, developer experience, and the tradeoffs around what can be open, what must stay proprietary, and how enterprise customers can audit without exposing core IP.
3. Scaling platform teams without starving them. I designed the split of our teams into a customer-delivery arm and a platform-investment arm so architectural work doesn't get eaten by customer urgency.
I still like being close to the technical surface area: the SDK a customer embeds, the API contract they build against, the repo structure an agent has to understand, the product proposal that turns an identity check into something reusable. The scope has changed, but the work is still the same at its core: make complex systems easier for other people to use safely.
Three things I'm focused on right now:
1. How AI coding agents actually change engineering organizations. Not the hype, the operating model. I ran a 10-engineer pilot with Claude Code, measured PR throughput uplift, and watched the gap close when the rest of the org adopted AI assistance. The bottleneck moved to repo readiness and context quality. The work now is infrastructure: a five-layer agentic framework (trigger, context, runtime, output, human gate), an internal plugin marketplace for 100+ engineers, and agent-ready repo standards enforced through Backstage.
2. SDK and platform architecture at the boundary between customer speed and product quality. That includes SDK architecture, integration APIs, developer experience, and the tradeoffs around what can be open, what must stay proprietary, and how enterprise customers can audit without exposing core IP.
3. Scaling platform teams without starving them. I designed the split of our teams into a customer-delivery arm and a platform-investment arm so architectural work doesn't get eaten by customer urgency.
I still like being close to the technical surface area: the SDK a customer embeds, the API contract they build against, the repo structure an agent has to understand, the product proposal that turns an identity check into something reusable. The scope has changed, but the work is still the same at its core: make complex systems easier for other people to use safely.
