Vault Labs StreamNex
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Our story

How this started

We do not take on more than eight active clients at a time.
Established since 2019
2019

Marcus Holt spent seven years as a data platform engineer at a logistics company in Austin, Texas, where the pipeline went down every time a major carrier updated their API. The fix was always the same: a manual script, a late night, and a promise that someone would build something better. In the spring of 2019, he left to build that something. Vault Labs StreamNex started as a one-person consultancy operating out of a rented desk at a co-working space on East 6th Street, taking on Kafka audits for two fintech startups that had outgrown their batch jobs.

Marcus Holt
Founder · 2019
Marcus Holt is the founder of Vault Labs StreamNex. He spent seven years as a data platform engineer at a logistics company in Austin, Texas, before starting the consultancy in 2019. His background is in distributed systems and event-driven architecture, with a particular focus on Kafka internals and consumer group behaviour under load. Before founding StreamNex, he contributed to an open-source Kafka monitoring tool that is still maintained by the Apache community. Outside of work, he runs long distances on the trails around Barton Creek and reads more infrastructure post-mortems than is probably healthy. His two most-cited pieces of writing are a 2021 deep-dive on partition rebalancing and a 2023 guide to dead-letter queue design that circulated widely in the Kafka community.