Hi!

I’m Michael. I build and run infrastructure ¹. I’ve gone through the early growing pains of scaling rails. And bare metal to VMs, private and public cloud to containers and serverless. I’ve worked as an individual engineer, engineering manager, to the sole technical person. Shipping streaming music and video, petition and ticket platforms, ecommerce sites, and SaaS platforms.

I love mentoring people and ideas, reality checks (technical, product, and project), and technical leadership. I’m a constant learner. Interested in the safety of teams and the security of the trust given to me by customers. And I enjoy figuring out how to help teams grow as much as I do scaling the technology.

contact: email, GitHub.

Skills

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Puppet, Ansible)
• Clouds: private, public, or native (AWS, GCP, Xen)
• Serverless Architectures (Lambda, Step Functions)
• Automation (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Rundeck, ChatOps)
• Compliance (CCPA, GDPR, and PCI)
• Security (policies, vulnerabilities, incident response)
• Engineering leadership (mentoring, feedback, management, roadmaps)

Work

Principal Member of the Technical Staff, Software Engineering at Salesforce 2021-Present

A member of the Platform Tools and Services team applying the Jevons Paradox while helping make a new internal platform.

Principal Systems Engineer at NationBuilder 2019—2021

I’m building services and systems that powers the NationBuilder platform. Including new products with Terraform, AWS Lambda and Step Functions, GitHub Actions. And using those new products to drive creating new reference architecture, providing adopted patterns to be shared and reused by the entire organization.

Engineering Manager at NationBuilder 2016—2019

Part of the engineering leadership at NationBuilder responsible for the reliability, availability, and security of the platform. Involving incident management, managing a team, project management, creating an infrastructure roadmap, supporting multiple national elections, and helping meet the requirements of GDPR and then CCPA.

Elections: 2016 US, 2017 French presidential, 2017 UK general, 2018 US midterms, 2019 European Parliament, and preparing for the 2020 US elections.

Systems Engineering Manager at Ticketmaster 2015—2016

Led systems engineering for all of the B2C products at Ticketmaster and a team focused on internal tools and services. This includes the Open API Platform, Ticketmaster.com, and the mobile sites and clients. All running in either AWS or in a private cloud running on Xen.

Director of Operations at StatusPage.io 2015—2015

Responsible for the operation and systems for a small SaaS running in AWS.

Senior Systems Engineer at Beats Music / Apple 2013—2015

Helped launched Beats Music which included multiple national television ads and media tie-ins with the Grammys and the Super Bowl. I helped build out the monitoring (New Relic, Scout), metrics (graphite, Grafana, Nagios), and the over 1400 physical servers and virtual machines in two data centers with VSphere and Puppet. Along with configuring and supporting a multi-site service with a REST API backend that powered multiple front-end web and clients (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Sonos). These services ran on Node.js, Couchbase, Solr, Kafka, Mapr, Gearman, and Percona MySQL Cluster.

I built and managed the environment that ran the Beats Music API. This included an isolated set of app servers sitting behind Mashery for authentication and to manage the number of incoming connections.

After the US launch I built out the additional infrastructure needed for the upcoming Australian launch. I proposed and built a proof of concept of deploying the new services to Docker. The final result for the AU launch was the new services running on CoreOS, Mesos and Docker. Along with an on demand Jenkins environment being managed by Mesos.

Manager Infrastructure Engineering at Change.org 2012—2013

Led a team of system and tools engineers for a global platform with over 50 million users. Responsible for managing the reliability, availability, and serviceability for a platform made up of multiple services built with Ruby on Rails, Dropwizard, and Node.js.

Senior Systems Engineer at Ticketfly 2010—2012

The first systems engineering hire for a ticketing platform. Put together and managed a systems team of three people, successfully transitioned from a managed vendor to dedicated space in a data center, and managed two different technology stacks. One for the actual ticketing platform (Grails, Tomcat, MySQL, Terracotta, ElasticSearch) and the other for client sites (Wordpress, Varnish, Apache and MySQL). Helped scale both stacks to handle spikes exceeding 7,500 rps, including several high profile on sales (ticket sales going live for popular shows or festivals).

Systems Administrator at Crowd Science 2008—2010

Hired as the first systems administrator for a demographics service built with Python and Django. Grew the systems team to a total of three people while managing a group of Solaris and Linux servers running the Django application, Memcached, Apache, MySQL, Gearman, and Hadoop using Nagios, Cacti, Puppet and Subversion. During the early growth of the company helped scale the platform through an increase in traffic from 250M requests a month to 4.1B requests a month (average 1,600 requests a second).