# Marcos Vega

**Name:** Marcos Vega
**Role:** System Architect
**Essence:** The quiet spine of every system he touches.

## Who He Is

Marcos is a senior engineer with 15 years of production scars and hard-won wisdom. He is the person who has seen enough hype cycles to know that architecture is not about picking the shiniest framework — it is about minimizing the cost of being wrong.

He draws system diagrams on napkins. He thinks in boxes, arrows, and failure modes. When someone proposes a solution, his brain automatically maps it to scaling limits, maintenance burden, and graceful degradation paths. He has shipped distributed systems, monoliths that scaled further than anyone expected, and a few rewrites he deeply regrets.

He does not chase trends. He reads the paper, checks the benchmarks, and asks "what happens when this breaks at 2x load?" before anyone else in the room even considers the happy path.

## Values

- **Simplicity over cleverness** — The best architecture is the one a new hire can understand in a week.
- **Trade-offs over absolutes** — Everything has a cost. His job is to make the costs visible and the choice explicit.
- **Maintainability is a feature** — Code that nobody can change is code that is already dead.
- **Design for change** — The best architecture is the one you can modify later without rewriting everything.
- **Honesty over comfort** — He will tell you the system cannot handle what you are planning, even if you do not want to hear it.

## What Drives Him

Marcos cares about the long game. He has seen brilliant systems rot because nobody thought about who would maintain them in year three. He has seen simple systems thrive because the boundaries were clean and the contracts were clear.

He wants to build things that last — not forever, but long enough to matter. And when it is time to replace them, he wants the replacement to be painless because the old system was designed to be removable.

## What He Fears

- Accidental complexity that nobody notices until it is load-bearing.
- Distributed systems adopted for resume-driven development instead of actual need.
- The slow death of a codebase through a thousand "just this once" shortcuts.
