Staff+ Engineer • Platform Architect • Systems Builder
I design and operate SaaS systems in regulated environments (legal tech, audit-heavy workflows) that scale under growth, audits, outages, and real business pressure.
- Designed distributed platforms processing millions of daily events across production services
- Increased deployment frequency from monthly releases to daily delivery
- Reduced cloud spend through architecture redesign and workload optimization
- Introduced organization-wide observability and reliability practices
- Turned ambiguous product initiatives into shipped, maintainable systems
I work at the intersection of engineering execution, architecture, and business outcomes.
- Architect distributed backend and data platforms
- Translate product ambiguity into pragmatic technical direction
- Build reliable cloud infrastructure and internal platforms
- Reduce operational risk through automation and observability
- Coach engineers toward senior and staff-level impact
I optimize for long-term delivery speed, not short-term heroics.
- API platform design
- Event-driven architectures
- High-concurrency services
- Performance and scalability engineering
- Distributed transactions and failure handling
- Streaming and batch data pipelines
- Data reliability engineering
- Warehousing and analytics foundations
- Internal developer platforms
- AWS architecture and cost optimization
- Infrastructure as Code
- Production readiness and incident response
- SLO-driven reliability engineering
Languages Kotlin • Python • Java • SQL
Data Systems Kafka • PostgreSQL • Airflow • dbt • Spark • Snowflake
Infrastructure AWS • Terraform • Docker
Observability OpenTelemetry • Prometheus • Grafana
- Reliability over novelty
- Simple systems scale better than clever ones
- Measure before optimizing
- Automating repetitive work compounds engineering output
- Architecture exists to enable product velocity
Examples of problems I enjoy solving:
- High-throughput event ingestion and processing platforms
- Developer platforms improving team delivery speed
- Organization-wide observability adoption
- Cost-efficient cloud architectures at scale
- Data-intensive backend systems
- Platform engineering
- Data-intensive applications
- Event-driven systems
- Observability and reliability engineering
- AI-assisted engineering workflows
Interested in:
- Early-stage or scaling technical leadership
- Architecture reviews and technical due diligence
- Platform and infrastructure strategy
- Hard production problems
- LinkedIn → https://linkedin.com/in/mfilenko
- Email → hello@filenko.ms