Mark E. Smerchek
Principal Software Engineer · Cloud Platform Architect
Python • AWS • FastAPI • Distributed Systems • AI Platform Engineering — Lenexa, KS
I design reusable cloud-native platforms, modernize enterprise applications, and turn complex business requirements into secure, scalable systems. 30+ years across financial technology, regulated industries, and large-scale data.
Selected Work
Common API Framework
Versioned FastAPI framework, distributed via pip and Lambda Layers, adopted as the engineering standard across 34 Lambda and ECS services — eliminating duplicated cross-cutting code.
Centralized Identity Platform
Customer-facing authentication on Auth0, later migrated to WorkOS — enabling enterprise SSO, SCIM, and consistent authorization in support of SOC 2.
Edge Authentication
CloudFront and Lambda@Edge patterns that enforce centralized identity controls before requests ever reach customer-facing applications.
Search Modernization
Replaced a costly third-party search dependency with PostgreSQL Full-Text Search after benchmarking — matching performance, improving accuracy, cutting recurring spend.
Event-Driven Site Matching
The organization's first event-driven microservice (SNS, SQS, Lambda, ECS, PostgreSQL, Airflow), establishing the pattern for decoupled backend processing.
Weather Intelligence Platform
Cloud-native platform combining hazard knowledge, alert normalization, analytics, and delivery services.
Pixelrez LLC · Since 2010
Founder
My independent software studio: custom web and mobile software that solves real operational problems, plus my own products shipped to the App Store. pixelrez.com
RenewalSuite
SaaS for tracking licenses, permits, insurance, and certifications across sites, with automated reminders. “Nothing expires on your watch.” Coming soon.
TXH & TXH Pro Archived
Texas Hold’em statistics for iOS, driven by simulation: 10 million hands per player count.
Time2Go Pro Archived
Voice-guided alarm assistant that counts down to your departure time with spoken reminders. “The app that talks to you!”
Pantomime Archived
iMessage sticker pack of expressive Pantomime characters.
Cool Vintage Watches Archived
Client iOS app for a vintage watch retailer.
Experience
Principal Software Engineer · Redica Systems
Principal backend and platform architect for shared engineering foundations, identity infrastructure, and cloud-native services.
- Architected the Common API Framework used across 34 production services.
- Designed customer-facing authentication (Auth0 → WorkOS) with enterprise SSO and SCIM.
- Guided teams to workload-appropriate serverless designs, replacing an always-on EC2 proposal with API Gateway, Lambda, and SNS.
- Established reliability patterns: dead-letter queues, alerting, idempotency, concurrency tuning.
- Architecture Review Board member, primary backend advisor, and mentor across teams.
Senior Software Engineer · Essex Management
AWS serverless services, data integrations, and validation utilities.
- Implemented a Kinesis data stream connecting QLDB to OpenSearch.
- Built transaction-maintenance and audit utilities; owned API design and testing.
Software Developer · Tradebot Systems
Financial analytics, data pipelines, internal platforms, and large-scale data systems.
- Modernized 200+ Visual Basic web pages to Python and Django.
- Configured and maintained a 6.5 PB Hadoop cluster.
- Built Luigi-based ETL pipelines for nightly batch processing; mentored junior developers.
Software Developer · BATS Exchange
Cross-platform C++ server applications, monitoring dashboards, and external client web APIs.
Senior Software Engineer · DST Systems
Technical lead for workstation development in C++, C#, and VB.NET. Recipient of the Robert L. Gould Innovation Award (2002).
Origins · 1992
Galactic Warrior — a BBS door game
In 1992 I wrote and sold Galactic Warrior, a multiplayer space trading and combat game for bulletin board systems — back when “online” meant dialing in and hoping no one picked up the phone. Turbo Pascal, DOS, 16,000+ lines, written in a modular fashion “so that updating and enhancements can be made with least effort and time possible.”
Where most door games of the era were session-centric and economy-only, Galactic Warrior was world-centric: a persistent universe combining trade, warfare, and territory — ports, planets, outposts, mines, cloaking devices, energy webs — with separate sysop maintenance tools and concurrency handling for multiple players sharing one world through direct file persistence.
Decades later, a collector preserving old door games reached out asking for a copy. I found it in my archives. The tools have changed completely; the instincts — engagement loops, state across sessions, performance within hard constraints — haven’t.
Lesson learned: never throw anything away.
Skills
- Languages
- Python, JavaScript, C++, C#, SQL
- Cloud
- AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Fargate/ECS, CloudFront, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, EventBridge, OpenSearch
- Frameworks
- FastAPI, Django, Pandas, NumPy, Jupyter, Luigi, Airflow
- Infrastructure
- Terraform, Docker, Linux, Git
- Identity
- Auth0, WorkOS, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SSO, SCIM
- Data
- PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Parquet, ETL
- AI
- Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, GitHub Copilot
Approach
I build reusable foundations that make the correct engineering approach the easy one to adopt.
- Choose technology based on workload and business requirements, not trends.
- Prefer the simplest architecture that satisfies reliability, security, performance, and growth.
- Make standards executable through frameworks, templates, and automation.
- Measure alternatives before committing to new infrastructure or dependencies.
- Treat developer experience as a multiplier for delivery and quality.
- Present tradeoffs objectively and build consensus through evidence.
Contact
Education: Friends University, B.S. · Kaw Area Vo-Tech, Computer Programming