Nathan Lucas
I build production-grade back-end platforms from scratch — currently shipping under Skeptik. A decade across Rust, Ruby, TypeScript, Python, and Java. Tier 1 support to Staff Engineer, by way of finishing the hard problem.
What's shipping right now.
Security infrastructure as one binary.
A 9-engine security platform — credentials, encryption, secrets, encrypted object storage, encrypted search, internal CA, authorization, secure notifications, and audit — running as a single binary with one auth model, one config format, one telemetry pipeline.
Real-time events that actually arrive.
A multi-tenant WebSocket transport with embedded WAL storage — no Redis, no broker, no external retry queue. Auth, presence, and chat engines ship built in and can be swapped without forking.
Catch revenue leaks before they reach the invoice.
Real-time metering and quota enforcement that runs in the request path, not after the fact. Atomic Redis Lua quota checks with two-phase reservation prevent overselling; Postgres takes over when Redis is unavailable.
Matching and discovery, without the ML team.
A consent-scoped social graph with matching, ranked feeds, and campaigns across five microservices behind Envoy. Warm and cold-start matching live in a single pipeline, with affinities isolated per context so one platform can power dating, networking, and community discovery without cross-contamination.
A practical bias toward systems that hold up.
Protocol before product.
I design the wire, the schema, and the failure modes before writing the application code. The platforms I ship are codegen-driven across six languages because the contract is the source of truth.
I own the hard problem.
Billing pipelines nobody could crack. Architectural migrations the team had been deferring. Integrations that became core revenue drivers. The pattern across a decade is the same — pick the load-bearing problem and finish it.
The limits ship in the docs.
Every platform's docs spell out what it does well and what it deliberately doesn't. You shouldn't discover a constraint in production. The same applies to the code I write inside a team.
Patterns over heroics.
I went from Tier 1 support to Staff Engineer by building things that outlast the team that shipped them. JWT standards adopted org-wide. Service patterns that defined a microservices migration. Tooling that mentored itself.