Mike Hall

Owned lane-level architecture for the Acquisitions platform, spanning customer application flows, partner integrations, and a large legacy application estate in a regulated financial environment. Operated as a senior individual contributor accountable for architectural integrity, production stability, and cross-team execution, with authority established through incident leadership, deep system knowledge, and cross-team trust. Focused on making system behavior observable and understandable across teams to enable data-driven decisions, reduce systemic risk, and support reliable change in long-lived systems.

• Acted as the final escalation point for high-severity production incidents, taking ownership of live diagnosis during large cross-functional calls, coordinating investigation across teams, establishing a shared understanding of system behavior, and driving concrete action plans with clear follow-up ownership.
• Transformed incident response into institutional learning by ensuring every major failure resulted in improved monitoring, clarified ownership, updated documentation, refined operational processes, and corrected cross-team touchpoints across systems with decades of accumulated history.
• Reconstructed end-to-end customer acquisition flows by mapping execution context from the customer’s browser through application layers, enterprise service middleware, and downstream business systems, creating an authoritative operational model to ground incident response, risk review, and change planning in observed reality.
• Designed and delivered a re-architecture of session state handling across complex, multi-step user workflows, eliminating a persistent integrity failure mode that impaired customer tracking, diagnosis, and incident recovery under real production conditions.
• Founded and led the OpenTelemetry Working Group, establishing shared observability standards and training engineering and cybersecurity teams to reason about system behavior using common telemetry; transitioned ownership once practices were institutionalized and adoption became self-sustaining.
• Led platform modernization and lifecycle remediation under continuous production load, maintaining regulatory compliance while reducing operational risk and restoring the ability to safely evolve legacy systems.
• Re-architected fragmented engineering ownership into a single accountable operating model, clarifying architectural responsibility and escalation paths as a necessary consequence of observed production realities.
• Founded an enablement function to isolate cross-cutting platform, risk, and remediation work from feature delivery, enabling sustained progress on long-horizon stability initiatives without disrupting customer-facing teams.

Skills: Platform Architecture, System Resilience, Incident Leadership, Observability, Legacy System Modernization, Distributed Systems, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, AWS

Took broad ownership of stabilizing and modernizing a shared Ruby on Rails platform supporting multiple business lines. Operated as a high-leverage individual contributor addressing architectural complexity, operational blind spots, and performance constraints while making system behavior legible, expanding observability, improving delivery reliability, and increasing insight into system and business behavior. Portions of this work supported preparation of platform-backed assets for external transition, alongside ongoing operational demands.

• Modernized and upgraded large portions of the Ruby and Rails stack across multiple applications, reducing technical debt, addressing security vulnerabilities, and improving long-term maintainability.
• Expanded operational visibility by introducing centralized logging and monitoring, working with hosting providers to interpret metrics and establish actionable insight into system behavior and capacity.
• Designed and built data pipelines synchronizing millions of records between internal systems and third-party services, enabling reliable high-volume operations and new business initiatives.
• Led data-layer remediation efforts by replacing expensive dynamic queries with Materialized Views, materially reducing load on high-traffic reporting and analytics workloads.
• Migrated session and cache workloads from MySQL to Redis, isolating transactional databases from non-critical load and improving response times under peak traffic.
• Optimized CI pipelines by reordering and parallelizing test execution, materially reducing feedback cycle time and improving delivery throughput.

Skills: Platform Modernization, Backend System Architecture, Ruby on Rails, System Observability and Monitoring, CI/CD Optimization, Data Pipelines (ETL), Data Analytics, Database Performance Optimization, Full-Text Search (PostgreSQL), Cache Layer Design (Redis), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Prometheus, Logentries, SendGrid

Engaged as a short-term senior contributor to address deep structural complexity in the core backend systems. Focused on improving testability, performance, and change safety within a tightly coupled legacy PHP codebase, while making targeted frontend enhancements to stabilize and extend the existing test suite.

• Diagnosed structural constraints in the core backend subsystem and established a path for safe iteration on contact management and business rules.
• Introduced testable query patterns and caching strategies to replace ad-hoc global data access, improving performance and enabling more reliable automated testing.
• Reduced risk in a highly coupled legacy codebase by isolating critical behaviors behind clearer boundaries, enabling incremental change without large-scale rewrites.
• Extended and hardened the existing frontend test suite in Ember, improving reliability and confidence in UI-driven workflows.
• Improved developer feedback loops by making previously opaque behavior observable through tests rather than runtime debugging.

Skills: Legacy System Modernization, Backend System Architecture, Testability and Change Safety, Performance Optimization, PHP, MySQL, Ember.js, JavaScript, Automated Testing

Took ownership of improving correctness, performance, and security for high-stakes assessment workflows. Focused on eliminating calculation errors, hardening response integrity, and defining safe integration boundaries for embedded client applications while improving database performance under load.

• Diagnosed and eliminated assessment calculation errors by analyzing and optimizing critical PostgreSQL queries using EXPLAIN ANALYZE and query planning tools, improving accuracy and response times.
• Implemented JWT-based response verification to prevent tampering and enforce once-only processing of assessment submissions, strengthening trust in platform outcomes.
• Designed and built a secure cross-origin communication API to support embedded client applications, establishing explicit trust boundaries between host and embedded contexts.
• Reduced operational risk by identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks affecting high-concurrency assessment workflows.
• Improved delivery reliability by introducing lightweight team practices that clarified acceptance criteria and reduced rework in high-impact assessment workflow changes.

Skills: Backend System Architecture, Data Integrity and Correctness, Secure API Design, Trust Boundary Definition, Database Performance Optimization, PostgreSQL, JWT Authentication, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Observability and Logging

Contributed to platform modernization efforts during a period of organizational transition and acquisition. Designed and implemented new API layers to safely expose internal capabilities, while working with the Customer Funnel team to evaluate and de-risk a planned rewrite of a large legacy system. Identified fundamental data and system knowledge gaps that informed a shift toward incremental modernization rather than wholesale replacement.

• Designed and built an API Gateway to expose selected internal services through well-defined, secure interfaces, enabling controlled integration with internal and external consumers.
• Evaluated the feasibility of a full rewrite of a legacy customer-facing system and demonstrated that unclear data lineage and billions of existing records made a big-bang migration impractical and high risk.
• Proposed and validated an incremental modernization strategy in which a new API layer operated alongside the legacy system, allowing new features to be developed independently while legacy functionality was migrated selectively.
• Designed a two-tier frontend architecture that separated user experience iteration from backend system constraints, reducing regression risk while enabling faster experimentation without destabilizing core systems.
• Modernized critical integration points by wrapping legacy functionality in Rails APIs, extending the useful life of the existing platform while enabling gradual transition to newer components.
• Reduced operational and maintenance risk by introducing code quality and security tooling, improving visibility into system health and failure modes.

Skills: Platform Architecture, API Gateway Design, Legacy System Modernization, Incremental Migration Strategies, Secure API Design, Data Migration Strategy, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, Redis, CI/CD and Code Quality Tooling

Technical co-founder/CTO (concurrent) responsible for all technology decisions, architecture, and product delivery. Built a customer-serving social media analytics platform from inception through deployment under evolving third-party API constraints.

• Architected and built complete social media analytics platform integrating Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram APIs to aggregate cross-platform insights for agency clients.
• Designed high-throughput data pipeline using Sidekiq Enterprise to process social media patterns and generate actionable recommendations.
• Implemented PostgreSQL JSONB storage strategy enabling flexible querying of heterogeneous social media data without schema migrations.
• Built and secured production infrastructure across DigitalOcean, Heroku, and Amazon RDS with automated deployment pipelines.
• Led product development and coordinated with design consultants to deliver customer-facing analytics interface and administrative reporting tools aligned to founder and investor expectations.
• Managed external teams to accelerate UI delivery while maintaining architectural consistency.

Skills: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Amazon RDS, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Twitter API, Facebook Graph API, Instagram API, New Relic, Rollbar

Re-launched Coderwall as an open-source project and led the community development efforts.

• Relaunched Coderwall as an open-source project and guided a diverse contributor community.
• Replaced Resque with Sidekiq to reduce background job cost on Heroku.
• Replaced MongoDB with Postgres to simplify queries, reduce costs, and improve maintainability.
• Improved Elasticsearch queries and upgraded the service to stabilize search performance and relevance.

Skills: AWS S3, Airbrake, Backbone.js, Bash, CSS, ElasticSearch, Git, GitHub, GitHub API, XHTML, Heroku, JRuby, JavaScript, MongoDB, Packer, PostgreSQL, Puma, RSpec, Redis, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Sidekiq, Stripe, Vagrant, Vim, Z shell (Zsh), jQuery

Foundations in enterprise systems, consulting, and early web scale, with emphasis on craftsmanship, mentoring, and resilient delivery under real production constraints. Built revenue-critical systems, introduced CI/CD practices, and moved from .NET to early Ruby/Rails adoption through community-driven engineering cultures.

• Obtiva (Software Craftsman) — Craftsmanship-focused consultancy; community leadership (Geekfest), mentorship, and transition from .NET to early Ruby/Rails delivery
• Coderwall / UpCity / Viewpoints — Startup platform work; full-stack delivery and scaling foundations
• TicketsNow — Revenue-critical fulfillment system; $2M+/year impact; acquired by Ticketmaster
• BrightStar / Motorola / BP — Enterprise .NET integration and operational systems across large organizations

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