Mark Starkman
Staff Software Engineer at PagerDuty
Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMark Starkman is a Staff Software Engineer with 14+ years of experience building and stabilizing large-scale web platforms, currently at PagerDuty after a long tenure improving reliability at Canvas/ Instructure. He pairs deep backend expertise in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL with front-end skills in JavaScript/React and practical SRE practices to reduce incidents, speed deploys, and improve observability. Mark has repeatedly led cross-functional teams to eliminate N+1 queries, optimize database access patterns, and automate deployment safety—cutting deploy times roughly in half and driving uptime to nearly 100% for mission-critical services. He’s equally comfortable as an individual contributor and as an engineering manager, having run teams, modernized hiring and interview processes, and introduced AI-assisted workflows to accelerate code comprehension. Based in Pennsylvania with a BSEE from University of Pittsburgh, he’s also active in mentoring and volunteer work, bringing a strategic, service-oriented mindset to engineering leadership. An underrated strength is his habit of coordinating changes across the full stack—APIs, logging, and third-party integrations—so reliability improvements stick.
14 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Pennsbury High SchoolElectrical Engineering, Electrical Engineering at Drexel UniversityBSEE Electrical Engineering, BSEE Electrical Engineering at University of Pittsburgh
Stackoverflow
1,546reputation
302kreached
14answers
15questions
Github Skills (41)
canvas-lms9
lms9
mongoid8
nodejs7
capybara7
ims7
macros7
database6
ruby-on-rails6
react6
sql-server6
cancan6
sql6
database-design6
rspec6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
mstarkman/rubymine-settings
Apr 2016 - May 2018
Contributions:208 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
mstarkman/can_be
Nov 2012 - May 2013
Contributions:79 commits in 5 months
railstype-ofrubyconsistentactiverecord-model
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