Open to the right opportunity
Software Architect.AI Builder.
I build teams and systems that scale. 12 years shipping software across fintech, healthtech, and developer tools — from founding engineer at a YC startup to managing 25 engineers at a public company. I care about developer experience, sustainable velocity, and building things that actually work in production.
AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
Certified in 2020, renewed 2023
KubeCon Speaker
Spoke at KubeCon NA 2023 on developer experience metrics
YC Founder
Founding engineer at YC W17 company (Finch)
Open Source Maintainer
Maintains deploy-guard (800+ stars) and pgmigrate
Experience
AI ContextStaff Engineer → Engineering ManagerCURRENT
Lattice Systems·Seattle, WA·2022-03-01 - Present
•Led platform team of 8 engineers building internal developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and shared service infrastructure
•Designed and shipped a feature flag system that reduced deployment risk and enabled 3x faster experimentation across 12 product teams
•Cut mean deploy time from 45 minutes to 8 minutes by migrating from Jenkins to GitHub Actions with custom caching
•Introduced architecture decision records (ADRs) that prevented two major rewrites and saved an estimated $2M in engineering time
•Grew the platform team from 3 to 8 engineers while maintaining team health scores above 85%
•Ran weekly office hours that became the most-attended voluntary meeting in engineering (40+ attendees)
TypeScriptGoKubernetesTerraformGitHub ActionsPostgreSQLRedisgRPCDataDog
Senior Engineer → Tech Lead
Vanta Health·San Francisco, CA (Remote)·2019-06-01 - 2022-02-01
•Tech lead for the claims processing platform handling $400M+ in annual transaction volume across 30+ insurance carriers
•Rebuilt the claims adjudication engine from a brittle rules engine to an event-sourced architecture, reducing processing errors by 94%
•Designed the carrier integration framework that reduced new carrier onboarding from 3 months to 2 weeks
•Led the SOC 2 Type II compliance effort for the engineering org, establishing security practices still in use today
•Mentored 6 engineers, 2 of whom were promoted to senior roles within 18 months
PythonFastAPIPostgreSQLKafkaAWSTerraformReactTypeScript
Founding Engineer (#3)
Finch (YC W17)·San Francisco, CA·2017-01-01 - 2019-05-01
•Third employee and first engineer hire — built the initial product from scratch through Series A ($12M)
•Designed and built the unified payroll API that connected to 40+ payroll providers (ADP, Gusto, Paychex, etc.)
•Built the real-time data sync engine processing 2M+ employee records nightly across all connected providers
•Hired and managed the first 5 engineers, establishing coding standards, review processes, and on-call rotations
•Survived YC Demo Day, Series A fundraising, and three near-death experiences (including running out of money with 11 days of runway)
Node.jsTypeScriptPythonPostgreSQLRedisAWSReactDocker
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon Web Services·Seattle, WA·2014-08-01 - 2016-12-01
•Built internal tools for the EC2 provisioning pipeline, reducing instance launch latency by 18%
•Designed a capacity forecasting system used by the EC2 planning team to predict hardware needs 6 months in advance
•On-call for a Tier 1 service with 99.99% SLA — learned operational excellence the hard way
•Wrote the team's first comprehensive runbook, which became the template for 12 other teams in the org
JavaPythonDynamoDBSQSS3CloudFormationLinux
Undergraduate Research Assistant
University of Washington (CSE Department)·Seattle, WA·2013-06-01 - 2014-06-01
•Contributed to research on distributed systems fault tolerance under Prof. Arvind Krishnamurthy
•Built testing harnesses for a novel consensus protocol, identifying 3 edge cases that led to a paper revision
•Co-authored a workshop paper at SOSP 2013 on failure detection in geo-distributed systems
C++PythonLinuxDistributed Systems
Skills Matrix
A transparent overview of my technical capabilities. I believe in knowing what you know, and acknowledging what you don't.
Strong
TypeScript
Go
Python
PostgreSQL
System Design
Engineering Leadership
React
AWS
Kubernetes
Moderate
Rust
Machine Learning
Kafka
Frontend Testing
Gaps
Areas where I rely on specialists or am currently learning.
Mobile Development
Data Engineering
What I'm Building Now
Active projects demonstrating current building capability.
by Marcus Chen
LIVE
Open-source GitHub Action that prevents deploying on Fridays, during incidents, or when the deploy queue is full. 800+ GitHub stars, used by 50+ companies.
GoGitHub ActionsPagerDuty APISlack API
by Marcus Chen
LIVE
Zero-downtime PostgreSQL migration toolkit. Generates safe migration plans and warns about locks, data loss, and breaking changes before they hit production.
RustPostgreSQLSQL Parser
by Marcus Chen
DEVELOPMENT
Analyzes on-call rotation fairness across teams. Tracks who gets paged, when, and how often, then generates equity reports and rotation suggestions.
PythonPagerDuty APIOpsgenie APIFastAPI
Swipe to see more projects
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