I make the technical decisions that are expensive to reverse.
I'm Mark Fasel, a solutions architect based in Palmetto, FL. I work where architecture, engineering leadership, and AI strategy meet — designing the boundaries, contracts, and integrations that determine whether a system stays clear as it grows.
Twenty years of it, across healthcare, retail, ecommerce, media, education, and enterprise platforms. Long enough to have been wrong in most of the interesting ways.
How I got here.
I started out building things for whoever would pay me, years before I had any business calling myself an architect. That work taught me faster than a job would have: when you are the only person on an engagement, you cannot hide behind a team, and every decision you make comes back to you.
The first decade in-house was healthcare. Four years at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital building clinical, research, and operational platforms in an environment where "we'll fix it in the next release" is not an available answer. Regulated, high-reliability work rearranges how you think about failure — you stop designing for the happy path and start designing for the day something goes wrong at 3am.
Then scale, in different shapes. Ramsey Solutions, building for millions of people across personal finance and media. Publix, on customer-facing ordering systems inside one of the largest employee-owned companies in the country. Four years at Scorpion leading frontend architecture and design systems — the foundation multiple product teams built on top of, which is where I learned that a design system is an organizational agreement wearing a component library as a disguise.
More recently the work moved toward integration and strategy: enterprise financial and aviation data platforms at Roghnu, and now enterprise solutions architecture at Life Surge — setting system boundaries, integration patterns, and AI strategy across multiple engineering teams, working directly with executive stakeholders.
The independent practice never stopped — Mark Fasel, LLC has run alongside the in-house roles since 2014. It is the part of the résumé that best explains how I think: I have spent twenty years walking into systems I did not build and being asked what to do about them.
The other half is the work nobody assigns. I design and build products of my own — commerce, reputation intelligence, business automation — which is where the architecture stops being advice and starts being something I have to live with. What I learn doing it ends up in the writing.
How I think about systems.
Four positions I hold, and would defend.
- 01
Systems over tools
Frameworks change every three years. The reasons a system fails do not. I optimize for the decisions that survive the next rewrite.
- 02
Business before code
Technology exists to produce an outcome. If I cannot state the outcome in a sentence a CFO would recognize, the architecture is not ready.
- 03
AI with intent
AI should improve decisions, not replace thinking. Most failed AI projects were never decision problems — they were process problems with a model bolted on.
- 04
Alignment creates scale
Most scaling problems begin as communication problems. Systems mirror the organizations that build them, so fixing the system usually means fixing an ownership boundary first.
How I work with teams.
Architecture is a team sport played badly by people who think it isn't.
- 01
Decisions get written down
An undocumented decision is a decision the team will relitigate in six months. I write down what we chose, what we chose against, and what would make us change our minds.
- 02
Constraints are stated out loud
Teams do not fail because they picked the wrong framework. They fail because two people held incompatible assumptions and neither said so.
- 03
The architect stays close to the code
Architecture that has not been checked against the codebase in a year is fiction. I keep my hands in the work, because the diagram is not the system.
- 04
Teach the reasoning, not the answer
The goal is a team that makes good decisions when I am not in the room. Handing down conclusions produces dependence; handing down the reasoning produces architects.
The record.
Seven roles, one continuous consulting practice, and the industries behind them.
- Oct 2025–PresentLife SurgeSolutions Architect
- Jan 2025–Oct 2025RoghnuSenior Software Developer
- Nov 2020–Oct 2024ScorpionSenior Front-end Product Developer
- Apr 2019–Nov 2020Publix Super MarketsSoftware Engineer
- Jun 2018–Jan 2019Ramsey SolutionsFront-end Developer
- Aug 2014–Jun 2018Johns Hopkins All Children's HospitalSenior Software Developer
- Jun 2012–Jul 2014LawLyticsSenior Front-End Developer → Creative Director
Mark Fasel, LLC
Independent Consultant — running alongside every role above.
Questions I get asked.
- What does a solutions architect actually do?
- I decide where the boundaries go. Which systems own which data, what the contracts between them look like, what gets built versus bought versus deleted, and which of those decisions will be expensive to reverse. The diagrams are a byproduct — the job is judgment under constraints, usually with incomplete information and a deadline.
- What kind of work do you take on?
- Two kinds. Technology and architecture advisory for organizations with real systems and real constraints — architecture reviews, AI strategy, platform modernization, integration design, and technical leadership. And AI automation for growing businesses that are drowning in manual work and want it to stop. They look different on the surface; underneath, both are about removing work that shouldn't exist.
- Are you available for consulting?
- Yes, selectively. I hold a limited number of engagements at a time so each one gets real attention. The fastest way to find out if there's a fit is to describe the problem and the outcome you need.
- Do you work remotely?
- Yes. I'm based in Palmetto, Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, and work with teams across the United States. Most engagements run remote, with onsite time when the work genuinely calls for it — usually early, when the goal is understanding how a team actually operates rather than how the org chart says it does.
- What's your background?
- Twenty years across healthcare, retail, ecommerce, media, education, and enterprise platforms — Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Ramsey Solutions, Publix, Scorpion, Roghnu, and Life Surge, alongside the independent practice I've run through Mark Fasel, LLC since 2014. The range matters: the same architectural mistakes recur across industries, and having seen them in a regulated hospital and a high-volume retailer makes them easier to spot in a third place.
Where to go next.
If you're evaluating me for an engagement, start a conversation. If you're evaluating me for a role, the full record is one click away.