Marcus J. Okonkwo

Profile

Principal Software Architect with 14 years designing distributed systems and cloud-native platforms across fintech and SaaS verticals. Deep expertise in microservices decomposition, event-driven architecture, and multi-region AWS deployments serving up to 40 million daily active users. Led three platform re-architecture programs that collectively reduced infrastructure spend by $4.2M annually while cutting p99 latency below 80 ms.

Work Experience

Principal Software ArchitectMar 2020 - Present

Veridian Financial Technologies, Austin, TX

Designed a multi-region event-driven payments platform on AWS (EKS, Kafka, Aurora Global), reducing transaction failure rates from 1.4% to 0.09% across 28M monthly users.
Decomposed a 9-year-old monolithic core-banking application into 34 independently deployable microservices, cutting mean deployment cycle time from 3 weeks to 4 hours.
Established a cross-functional Architecture Review Board and authored 60+ Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), reducing post-release critical defects by 41% over 18 months.

Senior Software ArchitectJun 2016 - Feb 2020

Lumenara Cloud Solutions, Denver, CO

Architected a multi-tenant SaaS analytics platform on GCP (Cloud Run, BigQuery, Pub/Sub) that scaled from 200 to 4,800 enterprise tenants without a re-platform event.
Drove adoption of a service mesh (Istio) and zero-trust networking model, achieving SOC 2 Type II certification 6 months ahead of board-mandated deadline.
Mentored 11 senior engineers through an internal architecture guild, with 4 promoted to staff or principal roles within two years.

Lead Software EngineerAug 2011 - May 2016

Orbis Health Systems, Chicago, IL

Redesigned the HL7 FHIR data ingestion pipeline using Apache Kafka and .NET, increasing throughput from 12K to 190K messages per minute with zero data loss.
Led a 6-engineer team to migrate 14 on-premise services to Azure, reducing hosting costs by $780K annually and improving uptime SLA from 99.5% to 99.97%.
Introduced contract-first API design (OpenAPI 3.0) and automated integration testing gates, cutting cross-team integration bugs by 63% in the first release cycle.

Skills

Microservices & Event-Driven ArchitectureAWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora, MSK) · GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Run)Apache Kafka · gRPC · GraphQL · OpenAPI 3.0Domain-Driven Design (DDD) · CQRS · Saga PatternKubernetes · Istio Service Mesh · Terraform · ArgoCDJava / Spring Boot · Go · Python · .NET 8Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) · C4 Model DiagrammingAWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalSOC 2 · HIPAA · PCI-DSS Compliance Architecture

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