Mark Sayson

Software engineering tech lead building security and privacy infrastructure, focused on simplifying how organizations implement security and privacy across distributed systems.

I write about distributed systems, with recent work focused on privacy engineering and data deletion infrastructure.

Selected Articles

Why data deletion is still an unsolved infrastructure problem

May 31, 2026: Why data deletion is the hardest privacy challenge in modern distributed systems.

Gaps in data deletion verification and auditability

Jun 13, 2026: All systems reported "Deletion succeeded", yet customer data continues to appear across marketing, analytics, and internal systems.

Using AWS Organizations to standardize security controls across AWS accounts

May 7, 2025: AWS Organizations provide a helpful, zero-cost way to centralize management of AWS accounts, with support for consolidating billing, role-based permission sets, service and resource control policies, and AWS service configurations.

Process for designing distributed systems

May 31, 2023: This post presents a structured approach to designing distributed systems, along with example questions and artifacts used at each stage.

Concurrency from single host applications up to massively distributed services

Dec 1, 2023: This post will describe several levels of concurrency, how they're commonly applied, and pros and cons of each approach.

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