Kazım Özyılmaz
Co-Founder at Arf
Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKazım Özyılmaz is a serial founder and engineer with 11 years of experience building blockchain-first financial infrastructure, currently co-leading Arf to modernize cross-border settlement using digital assets. He pairs hands-on protocol and smart contract work with product-facing fintech and regtech experience from founding XYZ Teknoloji and running a boutique consultancy, Monolytic. Academically rooted in Boğaziçi University doctoral research, his PhD focuses on integrating blockchain and IoT—bringing formal research perspective to pragmatic system design. He’s contributed to notable open-source crypto tooling such as zcash by improving cross-platform build and deployment robustness, reflecting a knack for solving subtle engineering edge cases. Based in Istanbul, he blends embedded and systems background with a track record of shipping compliant custody, payments, and DeFi infrastructure for regulated institutions.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
High School Degree, High School Degree at Istanbul Erkek LisesiBachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Electronics and Communications Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Electronics and Communications Engineering at Istanbul Technical UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University
English, German, Turkish
Github Skills (10)
dependency-management10
sh10
macos10
script10
shell10
scripting10
build-automation10
zcash9
cryptocurrency9
cicd8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
zcash/zcash
May 2017 - Jul 2018
Zcash - Internet Money
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:8 commits, 22 PRs, 33 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Kazım focused on improving the build and deployment process for the Zcash project. Their contributions involved fixing build failures caused by empty spaces in the PATH variable, supporting per-platform filename and hash settings for dependencies, and adding a curl method for parameter download. They also addressed macOS-specific issues with system linkers and parameter retrieval using shlock instead of flock.
moneyzcashinternet
kozyilmaz/nheqminer-macos
Mar 2017 - Jun 2018
Contributions:6 releases, 186 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 2 months
gpuavxcudamacos
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.