Matt Yarmolich

About Matt Yarmolich

I\'m a Senior Staff-level Backend Engineer and Systems Architect with 6+ years of experience building high-performance, fault-tolerant systems — primarily in the fintech domain. I specialize in designing scalable, cloud-native architectures using Kotlin, Java, and AWS infrastructure (ECS/Fargate, DynamoDB, RDS, CloudMap, Route53), with a strong focus on backend performance and developer enablement.At Ridgeline, I’ve led architecture across multiple domains — from greenfield services to platform-level infrastructure. I’ve built a custom MVCC-style in-memory database tailored to our data access patterns, benchmarked against CockroachDB and DuckDB. This system evolved from processing ~100 transactions/minute to thousands/sec, thanks to iterative performance engineering, thread-parallelism, and radical reductions in memory footprint — improving container memory usage by orders of magnitude.Beyond product engineering, I’ve contributed to internal tooling such as our service library, which standardized infrastructure setup and Terraform patterns — including variable-based service sizing across environments. My leadership style favors a strong IC track: I mentor engineers toward architectural ownership and scalable thinking while keeping my hands deep in the design and implementation trenches.I gravitate toward technically demanding environments — particularly in fintech or systems that require deep domain modeling, high throughput, and strong consistency guarantees. I value companies that empower engineers to take end-to-end ownership, emphasize technical rigor, and solve problems at scale.

Experience

1. Senior Staff Engineer

   Ridgeline

   Mar 2024 — Present · Reno, NV, US

   Technical Leadership & Architecture:Architected mission-critical backend systems in a modern, serverless fintech platform — including core accounting, reconciliation, and reporting domains.Led the transition of a stateful, singleton accounting service to a stateless, horizontally scalable system. Designed an MVCC-based in-memory database with custom linked-list structures and indexing to optimize for domain-specific data access patterns.Scaled system throughput from ~100 transactions/min to thousands/sec across multithreaded infrastructure while reducing container memory footprint by 100x+ through successive architecture and code optimizations.Systems Engineering & Infrastructure:Championed a data-locality approach to reporting architecture, enabling cross-service federation without requiring data duplication — leveraging AWS CloudMap, Route53, and ECS.Designed and deployed infrastructure patterns adopted across teams, including variable-based service sizing in Terraform and reusable libraries to accelerate service provisioning and compliance.Built event-driven systems with as-of, as-on data models to support high-throughput workflows and downstream consistency guarantees.Mentorship & Cross-Team Collaboration:Grew a backend team from 2 to 20+ engineers; mentored developers across multiple service teams to make architectural decisions and write high-quality, scalable code.Led the Core Accounting team (~10 engineers) in evolving data models, improving domain abstractions, and introducing modern technologies like Redis, Step Functions, and ECS Fargate into our stack.Established testing frameworks and dev workflows that improved collaboration between developers, QA, and SMEs — accelerating delivery without sacrificing reliability.

Education

• California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo

  Bachelors in Science, Software Engineering

  2015 — 2019