Erik Aker
Principal Engineer at Mulligan Funding, LLC
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolErik Aker is a Principal Engineer based in San Diego with 13 years building cloud-native, event-driven systems and leading engineering teams from small startups to enterprise environments. At Mulligan Funding he grew engineering from a two-person team to 16, architected and shipped 30+ microservices across multiple platforms, and implemented a company-wide Kubernetes observability stack adopted by developers. He is a hands-on polyglot who authors high-performance Rust backends and async Python services, contributes to prominent open-source projects like crates.io and Starlette, and designs robust event and auth systems integrated with Azure Eventhub, CosmosDB, Redis, and Postgres. Comfortable both as an individual contributor and manager, he writes design docs, PoCs, and production code while mentoring teams in modern CI/CD, testing, and cloud security practices. With an academic background in humanities, he brings rare cross-disciplinary clarity to system design and developer experience, favoring collaborative teams where experimentation and safe failure drive learning.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) English Language and Literature/Letters, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) English Language and Literature/Letters at University of California, BerkeleyM.A. Humanities/Humanistic Studies, M.A. Humanities/Humanistic Studies at University of Chicago
German
Stackoverflow
7,735reputation
1.6mreached
166answers
19questions
django
top-5%
elasticsearch
top-5%
python
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
postgresql10
pytest10
python10
apidoc10
testing10
http10
api10
asgi10
servant10
web-framework10
rust10
haskell10
tdi10
django9
elasticsearch9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
encode/starlette
Apr 2020 - Feb 2022
The little ASGI framework that shines. 🌟
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 3 reviews, 8 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Erik primarily focused on improving the cookie parsing functionality within the Starlette framework. They implemented more lenient cookie parsing to handle edge cases and compatibility issues, adding tests to ensure correctness. The user also addressed memory usage concerns related to middleware, modifying the queue size in the `BaseHTTPMiddleware` class. Furthermore, they participated in version releases, bumping the version number and adding release notes.
asgipythonwebsocketsframeworkasync
haskell-servant/servant
Oct 2018 - Oct 2018
Servant is a Haskell DSL for describing, serving, querying, mocking, documenting web applications and more!
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 75 comments in 11 days
Contributions summary:Erik primarily contributes to the testing of the Servant library, a Haskell DSL for web applications. Their work focuses on creating and refining testing strategies for various aspects of the library's functionality, including business logic, third-party resource interactions, and API-wide rules using `servant-quickcheck`. The commits demonstrate the use of `hspec-wai` for request testing and `servant-client` for client function creation. They are working on ensuring that the testing framework covers different scenarios, particularly error handling and proper response validation.
web-applicationsservingqueryinghaskelldsl
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