SOFTWARE ENGINEER

MARKUS MULHOLLAND

Building distributed systems that serve
millions of requests per minute

...and keyboards, IoT systems, electronics, music

PROFILE

Markus Mulholland

I build systems—from cloud platforms to circuit boards.

Six years architecting distributed backends that serve millions of requests at scale. I've designed and shipped order fulfilment platforms, real-time search systems with localisation and personalisation, as well as countless features for customer-facing apps across many databases and cloud systems.

My technical range extends beyond the cloud. I design PCBs and manufacture custom keyboards, build IoT monitoring systems with Modbus and MQTT, work with low-level firmware on microcontrollers, and operate comfortably in Linux environments. I've built load testing frameworks, written comprehensive test suites, studied mathematics and ML, and solved problems across the entire stack, from database schemas to soldering components.

I love industrial design and I've spent a lot of time in CAD software and 3D printing. I've been playing guitar and producing music in Ableton for years. Check out my photography

Generalist mindset, specialist execution.

KEY PROJECTS

Distributed Search Platform

Architected a distributed search system from scratch handling 1M requests/min at peak. Multi-service architecture with FastAPI HTTP servers, internal RPC layer (Python + Protobuf + ZeroMQ), and Kafka-based CDC pipelines. OpenSearch cluster with BM25 ranking, semantic embeddings, geohash-based caching in Redis, and dynamic synonym expansion per vertical.

FastAPI OpenSearch Protobuf EKS Kafka Redis

Multi-Tenant On-Demand Order Fulfilment SAAS

Designed and led a team building an order orchestration platform integrating three separate companies. Exposed APIs for order injection, catalogue sync, and stock management. Coordinated in-store picking flows with barcode scanners. ~10 Laravel services deployed via Vapor, 5 Aurora MySQL clusters, SQS for async processing.

AWS Lambda Laravel Aurora MySQL SQS

TECHNICAL STACK

Backend

Python · FastAPI · Laravel · PHP · Protobuf · gRPC · Pydantic · SQLAlchemy

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS · EC2 · Lambda · S3 · CloudFormation · VPC · IAM · Route53 · API Gateway · CloudFront

Databases & Storage

Postgres · MySQL · Aurora · DynamoDB · OpenSearch · Redis · Firestore · TimescaleDB

Messaging & Events

Kafka · ZeroMQ · SQS · Kinesis · MQTT · AWS IoT Core

Observability

Grafana · OpenTelemetry · Loki · Prometheus · Datadog · CloudWatch

Testing & Performance

Pytest · Locust · Mockito · Docker Compose

Orchestration & Deployment

Kubernetes · EKS · Docker · ArgoCD · Helm

Tools & Platforms

Git · GitHub Actions · Linux · Bash · Postman

HARDWARE

Custom Keyboard Design

Wireless split keyboards from scratch. PCB design, 3D-printed cases with custom tenting, firmware on ZMK/KMK.

Alphazar MK3 Keyboard Alphazar MK2 Keyboard Alphazar MK3 Detail

Solar Station IoT Monitoring

Modbus interface to Raspberry Pi. OTA management via AWS IoT Core and MQTT. Designed full technical approach and proof of concept.

Factory Dashboard Infrastructure

Grafana operational dashboards deployed on Raspberry Pi for manufacturing facility monitoring.