Kurtis Mullins
Welcome! My name is Kurtis. Originally from Ohio, moved to Central Maine in 2021 with my family, where we have a small homestead. When I'm not writing code or tinkering in the homelab, you'll find me training BJJ, working on the property, exploring Maine, or catching live music.
Freelance
Professionally, I'm a backend and infrastructure software engineer specializing in the systems that keep everything else running — cloud infrastructure, distributed backends, internal tooling, and automation. I've been doing this since 2007 for startups, SaaS products, game studios, open source, and large-scale infrastructure.
I take on a small number of focused projects at a time. The work tends to be things like: standing up or cleaning up cloud infrastructure, building internal tools a team has been putting off, or owning a backend project that needs senior attention without a full-time hire. I tend to work with the same people more than once.
If you've got something that keeps getting deprioritized, reach out. A discovery call is a good place to start.
Background
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The Water Institute 2025
SRE for FloodID, a hurricane and flood forecasting platform — Terraform, Kubernetes, and HPC infrastructure.
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Clockwork Labs 2023–2025
Platform engineering at a game studio building SpacetimeDB, an open-source multiplayer game backend.
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Equinix Metal 2021–2022
Staff engineer on the platform engineering team, provisioning and managing 50+ bare-metal Kubernetes clusters across global datacenters.
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Red Hat 2019–2021
Senior developer on Quay.io, a container registry at ~1 billion requests/month.
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ReCharge Payments 2018–2019
Lead developer on subscription checkout infrastructure during rapid growth.
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Rackspace 2016–2018
Internal tooling and automation for datacenter-scale infrastructure management.
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Cox Media Group 2014–2016
Django CMS backing 50+ radio, TV, and newspaper publications at ~1,000 req/min.
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Freelance 2008–2014
Independent development across clients and products, including an NSF I-Corps startup.
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Wright State University 2008–2012
B.A., Computer Science.
Writing
Notes
Photos
Interests
- Grappling
- Training no-gi BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, think wrestling but with submissions) since 2014. The long-term goal is to open a small community grappling club.
- Homesteading
- Rebuilding my house from the ground up, while living in it. Growing food in Maine's harsh climate, rainwater collection, firewood, solar cooking, woodworking. Also learning embedded development: low-power sensors and wireless protocols for devices scattered across the property, far from any WiFi access point. Self-sufficiency over aesthetics.
- Photography
- Sony A7 IV. Maine landscapes, family, whatever catches my eye. Currently working on shadows, lighting, composition, and posing.
- Homelab
- Proxmox, NixOS, Kubernetes, a rack of low-power servers and networking gear, fiber between the house and barn. I run my own apps for the household and experiment with whatever's interesting.
- Rust
- Actively learning, genuinely excited. Far from an expert but getting there.
- Game Development
- Roblox and Scratch with my kid. Personal experimentation with Unity, Unreal, SDL, and currently Bevy. Interested in game mechanics and the systems underneath, not the graphics or physics layer.
- Retro Tech
- Old computers, retro game systems, alternative OSes. Using Linux since Red Hat 6 and early Slackware. OpenBSD, AmigaOS, big iron. Any system with a story.
- Live Music
- Local bands at local venues, camping at festivals when the stars align.
- Exploring
- Hiking, finding good food, poking around little towns, and going to events like Common Ground Fair and the occasional ren faire. Maine has more going on than people think.
- Values
- Free and open source software, data sovereignty, owning your own infrastructure. Shopping local, buying less, buying better. Self-sufficiency where it makes sense.