Mariela K. Voss
Senior Backend Engineer · Infrastructure & Distributed Systems
Backend engineer with 8+ years building reliable, high‑throughput distributed systems.
Focus on observability, performance, and developer velocity.
Passionate about open source and designing APIs that endure.
Experience
Senior Backend Engineer · Cratebase Inc.
2021 – present
- Designed and built a multi‑tenant event pipeline processing 2M+ events/min using Kafka, Go, and Avro; reduced latency by 40%.
- Led migration of 12 microservices from monolith to Kubernetes; cut deployment time from 15 min to 2 min.
- Introduced structured logging and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) reducing mean time to resolution by 35%.
- Mentored 4 junior engineers through code review, design docs, and pairing sessions.
Backend Engineer · Polaris Payments
2018 – 2021
- Architected idempotent payment ingestion API (Go + PostgreSQL) processing $3B+ transaction volume annually.
- Reduced p99 latency for settlement reporting from 9s to 900ms via query optimization and connection pooling.
- Designed database sharding strategy for growing ledger, supporting 300% account growth.
Software Engineer · Relay Health
2016 – 2018
- Built RESTful APIs for healthcare interoperability (FHIR) serving 500+ hospital systems.
- Improved CI/CD pipeline with automated integration tests, raising deployment frequency from weekly to daily.
- Contributed to internal developer toolkit (Python / Flask) used by 6 product teams.
Projects
K9s Logs Viewer · github.com/mkvoss/k9s-logs
Terminal UI for browsing Kubernetes pod logs with fuzzy search and regex filtering.
Written in Go with bubbletea. 1.2k stars, used by multiple SRE teams.
PingHash · github.com/mkvoss/pinghash
Distributed consistent hash ring implementation in Rust with rendezvous hashing and gossip membership.
Used as a learning vehicle for CRDT concepts.
mold‑trace · github.com/mkvoss/mold-trace
Low‑overhead eBPF‑based tracer for Go goroutine blocking events.
Helps debug latency issues in production without code changes.
Education
University of California, Berkeley
· M.S. Computer Science
2014 – 2016
University of Washington
· B.S. Computer Engineering, cum laude
2010 – 2014
Awards & Achievements
Cratebase Engineering Excellence Award (2023) — for redesign of event ingestion pipeline.
Co‑author, "Practical Observability for Event‑Driven Architectures" — QCon London 2024.
Open Source contributor — Apache Kafka, Linkerd, Prometheus.