Principal Engineering Leader & AI Systems Architect

Mark is an experienced Engineering Leader with over 12 years in building and scaling systems and teams. He excels at unblocking teams, scaling infrastructure, and ensuring successful product shipments, especially when systems, product, and organization are misaligned. His expertise spans eng leadership (hiring, leveling, process), org design for early and scaling teams, architecture for growth, DevOps/DevEx (CI/CD, tooling, developer velocity), compliance (HIPAA, security, audit-ready systems), and AI systems (retrieval, local inference, agent workflows). He has previously worked at a YC-backed startup, Calm, and as a nonprofit CTO, scaling systems for millions of users and enabling rapid growth. Through Opertus Systems, he focuses on improving reliability, reducing manual operations, and shipping robust automation and AI solutions. Mark is seeking full-time roles in eng leadership, eng management, product, or program, as well as fractional CTO and contract work, particularly with teams scaling product and infrastructure together or organizations integrating AI into real systems.