Marcus Kane

Staff Backend Engineer · Distributed systems · Austin, TX

Eleven years building payment infrastructure, high-throughput APIs, and on-call systems. Recently displaced; currently leaning into AI-assisted development and looking for the next deep-stack engineering team to join.

TodayLast active

Jan 2026Joined

~1 dayAvg reply

12Mutual connections

176Supporters

Pulse Sent Today

Affected by AI Affected by layoffs

Open to contract

🤝 Connect 💬 Message 🫡 On Your Feet, Soldier · 140 ⇪ Refer to a role

About

Backend engineer with eleven years building distributed systems, payment infrastructure, and high-throughput APIs. Recently displaced after AI automation reduced my department from 14 engineers to 4.

Currently leaning into AI-assisted development — building side projects with Claude and learning where humans still add the most leverage. Open to startups that want a senior engineer who has seen things break.

Skills

Go Python Postgres Kafka Kubernetes AWS System Design On-call Leadership

Experience

2019 — 2026

Staff Backend Engineer

Paylane — payments infra, ~1200 people
2015 — 2019

Senior Engineer

Routeway — logistics SaaS
2013 — 2015

Software Engineer

First.io — early-stage startup

Recent Pulses

TodayAffected

Shipped a small CLI side project this morning. Talking to two seed-stage founders this week.

2 days agoAffected

First rejection of the week. Stings a bit. Going for a run, then back to it.

5 days agoAffected

Started a study group with 4 other displaced engineers. We meet Tuesdays. Open to one or two more.