I help teams design and stabilize complex software systems.

I'm Mark Holton, a software architect with 25+ years of experience designing and operating production systems.

I work with growing teams navigating distributed systems complexity, reliability issues, or architecture decisions.

Engagements can be advisory, hands-on, or a mix of both. Most begin with an architecture review or stabilization sprint.

Teams usually reach out when:

A system has grown more complex than the team can easily reason about
Reliability issues or incidents are becoming frequent
A startup is preparing for scale or technical diligence
AI systems need to move from prototype to production

System Architecture & Reliability

Designing systems that remain understandable as they scale.

Event-driven and asynchronous architectures (Kafka, Redis Streams)
Distributed systems boundaries and service design
Observability and operational visibility
Architecture reviews and system redesigns

System Stabilization

Helping teams diagnose and resolve structural issues in complex systems.

Diagnosing recurring incidents and operational bottlenecks
Simplifying complex service interactions
Improving observability and system legibility
Creating architecture roadmaps for scaling teams

AI Systems & Durable Workflows

Moving AI systems from demos to reliable production workflows.

Multi-agent orchestration and workflow design
Durable workflows using Temporal
RAG systems with reliable retrieval architecture
Production-grade error handling and observability

Representative Systems

Event-Driven Platform for Conversational Systems

Architecture for an event-driven platform processing billions of events per month, supporting operational workflows and large-scale analytics pipelines.

Durable Workflow Architecture for Agentic Systems

Designed Temporal-based workflows coordinating long-running AI-driven research processes.

Event-Driven Analytics Systems

Designed distributed analytics pipelines enabling telemetry and operational analysis at scale.

Background

I've spent more than 25 years building production software systems, including over a decade as a software architect at Salesforce working on event-driven systems at scale.

Today I run NoraFoundry, an independent architecture practice focused on helping teams design and evolve complex software systems.

Experience building and architecting systems

Large enterprises