Marcus Whitfield — Senior Backend Engineer
Austin, TX
Backend engineer with eight years on payment and messaging systems that cannot go down. Took a checkout service from 1.2% failed transactions to 0.08%, and now leads the three-person group that owns it.
Experience
Senior Backend Engineer, Northbank Payments · March 2022 – present
Payments platform group of nine. Owns authorization, settlement and the merchant ledger.
- Rebuilt the authorization path around an idempotency ledger, taking failed transactions from 1.2% to 0.08% and ending a class of duplicate-charge refunds worth about $340k a year.
- Cut p99 settlement latency from 2.4s to 310ms by replacing nightly batch reconciliation with an event-sourced ledger in Go.
- Led the migration of 40 services to a shared gRPC contract, retiring 11k lines of per-service HTTP glue.
- Wrote the on-call runbook the team still uses; paging volume fell by half in the quarter after it landed.
Backend Engineer, Cedarline Systems · June 2019 – February 2022
- Designed the message bus behind a fleet-tracking product serving 18,000 vehicles, sustaining 90k events a minute on three nodes.
- Moved the deploy pipeline from hand-run scripts to GitOps, taking a release from 40 minutes of supervision to four.
- Found and fixed a connection-pool leak that had caused six months of Monday-morning outages.
Software Engineer, Aperture Retail · August 2017 – May 2019
- Built the inventory sync between five warehouses and the storefront, cutting oversold orders by 71%.
- Added the integration test suite the team had gone two years without; it caught 23 regressions in its first quarter.
Projects
- Ledgerkit — An open-source double-entry ledger for Go, used by four payment startups.
Education
- B.S. Computer Science · University of Colorado Boulder · August 2013 – May 2017
Skills
- Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL, Rust
- Systems: Kubernetes, gRPC, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Terraform
- Practice: Event sourcing, Distributed tracing, Load testing, Incident review
Certifications
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CNCF
