Marcus D. Whitfield

Profile

Senior Software Engineer with 9 years building distributed systems and cloud-native APIs at fintech and SaaS scale. Specializes in Go and Python back-end architecture, Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and platform reliability engineering. Reduced p99 API latency by 61% at current employer and led a team of 6 engineers through a zero-downtime microservices migration serving 4 million active users.

Work Experience

Senior Software EngineerMar 2021 - Present

Clarivex Financial, Austin, TX

Redesigned the payment-processing pipeline in Go, cutting p99 latency from 820 ms to 320 ms and eliminating $2.1 M in annual SLA penalty exposure.
Led a 6-engineer squad to decompose a 400 KLOC Django monolith into 18 Kubernetes-hosted microservices, achieving zero-downtime cutover across 4 M active users over 11 months.
Instrumented distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry and Datadog, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) incidents by 74% and cutting on-call pages by 38% quarter-over-quarter.

Software Engineer IIJun 2018 - Feb 2021

Orbis Cloud Solutions, Denver, CO

Built a multi-tenant data-ingestion service in Python (FastAPI) processing 9 B events per day with 99.97% uptime over 18 months of production operation.
Automated CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, shrinking average deployment cycle from 4 days to under 90 minutes across 12 product teams.
Mentored 4 mid-level engineers through weekly code reviews and architecture sessions, two of whom were promoted to senior roles within 14 months.

Software EngineerAug 2015 - May 2018

Telepath Labs, Boulder, CO

Developed real-time WebSocket notification service in Node.js handling 50 K concurrent connections with sub-20 ms message delivery at peak load.
Migrated legacy MySQL reporting queries to a columnar Redshift warehouse, reducing nightly ETL runtime from 6.5 hours to 22 minutes for a 3 TB dataset.
Introduced property-based testing with Hypothesis, raising critical-path code coverage from 54% to 91% and catching 17 pre-production defects in the first quarter.

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