Marcus Belcastro

Employment & Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer

Weel • 2023 — 2026 (3 years)

Full-stack dev in fintech, focusing on product features, ISO/SOC, and DevOps/SRE.
I've been apart of every engineering team in the org, and reported to the CTO and Head of Eng.
Python Django, React, React Native, Next.js, AWS, Terraform, GraphQL, Postgres, MongoDB.
Solo projects: Customer-facing micro-service, head of non-eng vibe-coder engagement, and an internal admin panel used by whole business.
Led multiple zero-downtime migrations and upgrades. React/React Native versions, Postgres, Platform migrations, EC2 → Fargate.
Lead ISO/SOC compliance engineer. Got engineering from 0 → 100% compliance in <1yr.
Created the DevOps function and headed the DevOps Team.

Mid-level Software Engineer

Instawork • 2023 (6 months)

Implemented product changes to enhance business user experiences and growth.
Python Django, DRF, React, TS, Bootstrap, Hyperview, Mode, Datadog, AWS, Terraform, Docker, SQL, Celery, Salesforce, Jest, Nightwatch, OpenAPI, OpenAI.
Delivered BI pipeline from backend to Salesforce for sales insights.
Drove security initiatives: patched critical vulns and updated dependencies.

Co-Founder & Technical Lead

Yora Settlements • 2019 — 2023 (3 years)

Co-founded and built a cryptocurrency trading platform end-to-end.
Designed core backend micro-services in Python on Linux.
Managed contractors; owned 4 REST APIs (Flask + OpenAPI), public and private.
Implemented robust security: firewalls, VPNs, scoped permissions, encryption.
Built testing across units/endpoints/performance; administered SQL hosting and AWS.
Published Python library improving transactional throughput 5x.

Co-Founder & Technical Lead

Western Sydney Software • 2022 (1 year)

Built serverless backends in Python on AWS (S3, Lambda, SQS, SES, API GW).
Security consulting and automation solutions for clients.
Managed contractors; authored proposals and plans for tenders.

Software Developer

Western Sydney University • 2022 (6 months)

Delivered a Unity C# application with feature and unit testing.
Built a Laravel REST API with SQL backend to manage app state.
Handled Linux system administration and deployments.

Software Developer & Linux Sysadmin

MLC@Home • 2021 (6 months)

Contributed to ML validity research using distributed HPC.
Improved C++ training code; hardened and optimized Python orchestration code.
Managed SQL/MongoDB and published an on-disk radix tree validation lib.

Qualifications & Education

AWS Certified Developer — Associate

Completed in 2024

Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced) with Distinction

Western Sydney University • 2019 — 2021

Major in Cyber Security • GPA 6.7/7 • ACS Accredited Professional.

Higher School Certificate

Wyndham College • 2017 — 2018

Band 6 student; completed university-level Physics 1 via WSU Access Program.

A bit about me

I'm a full-stack software engineer. I started tinkering with code as a teenager by blinking some LEDs on a Raspberry Pi with Python. I've always been fascinated by computers ever since I was about 12 when my dad purchased our first family personal computer.

I very much have a love for infrastructure, especially commercial grade stuff, including cloud providers like AWS. The understanding of how code is shipped, executed, and gets to people is more interesting to me than the code itself.

I thrive on doing things I've never done before. My latest muse is that of the sub-atomic, and it's my goal to work in Nuclear, Quantum, Chip Manufacturing, Particle Physics, or Photonics.

A little bit about myself: I love nature and the outdoors, and activities that push my physical and mental limits. I also like to describe my personality as quite scientific. I demand precision and the scientific method in almost everything that I do and work with, but strive for creativity and fluidity when working with other people.