Mike Hall

Served as Senior Technical IC and Software Architecture Lead for the Acquisition lane of a regulated financial enterprise, establishing end-to-end architecture discovery and distributed observability across the loan application and digital origination lifecycle, while guiding legacy modernization, cybersecurity investigations, and cross-team platform reliability.

• Originations IC Delivery & Team Realignment: Led the Originations Verification squad through consecutive Exceeds Expectations ratings, architecting and shipping the Speedfunds instant loan disbursement pipeline (funding to debit cards in minutes vs multi-day ACH). Progressed to Software Architect for the Acquisition Lane, consolidating two attrition-impacted teams into a unified, high-velocity delivery unit before converting to Associate Director, Staff Engineer upon corporate architecture track restructuring.
• ACQ Enablement & Architecture Discovery: Founded and technically led the ACQ Enablement team to establish end-to-end system mapping across seven heterogeneous acquisition channels spanning direct-to-consumer web/mobile funnels, direct mail campaigns, partner affiliate APIs, and authenticated renewal workflows. Mapped the intersection of business decisions, customer actions, system state transitions, and source code execution paths while driving PII remediation, cybersecurity forensic mapping, and platform modernization for ACQ Growth teams.
• Enterprise Trace & Operational Alignment: Architected distributed telemetry across Rails distributed monoliths, MuleSoft APIs, and IBM mainframe backends. Partnered directly with Cybersecurity, the Enterprise Monitoring Center (EMC), SRE, and Incident Command to align immediate operational monitoring with long-term distributed tracing, diagnosing and eliminating a persistent multi-service defect that caused 4% silent traffic loss at late-stage e-signing.
• Sustained Community Enablement & SRE Handoff: Drove a dedicated 3-year cultural and technical enablement initiative: founded Geekfest@OMF (weekly recorded technical brown-bag sessions across the enterprise for 1 year) before evolving the forum into the weekly OpenTelemetry Working Group (OTel WG), scaling voluntary attendance to 40+ cross-lane engineers. Mentored and partnered with SRE leads to transition ongoing operational facilitation, establishing a durable, self-sustaining community of practice while returning to Acquisition Lane architecture representation.
• Applied AI & Innovation Leadership: Placed in two corporate hackathons (building early conversational agents with Rasa and automated schema inference tools with Bonsai Buckaroos). Introduced local LLM orchestration and privacy-conscious AI developer workflows at Geekfest@OMF, establishing early evidence-based patterns for legacy code discovery and developer productivity.

Led backend stability, performance, and modernization for high-traffic Rails products, improving full-text search, campaign delivery pipelines, and data layer reliability while systems remained under production load.

• Search Modernization & Infrastructure De-Risking: Eliminated external cluster failure modes and lowered operating footprint by transitioning legacy Sphinx infrastructure to optimized MySQL full-text search and relational indices under live production traffic.
• Zero-Downtime Platform Upgrades: Led Ruby and Rails framework upgrades across multiple core applications, sequencing database migrations and dependency updates to maintain uptime during platform modernization.

Short-term senior contract on the Contacts team of a large-scale PHP/MySQL CRM platform. Focused on testability, performance, and change safety inside a tightly coupled legacy backend while extending the Ember.js frontend test suite.

• Testable Query Patterns: Replaced ad-hoc global data access functions with structured, cacheable query patterns in the PHP backend, improving performance and enabling reliable automated testing where none existed before.
• Legacy Boundary Isolation: Identified and isolated structural constraints in the core contact management subsystem, reducing risk for incremental change without requiring large-scale rewrites.
• Frontend Test Hardening & Boundary Verification: Hardened Ember.js frontend test coverage across core contact management workflows, creating verification gates that allowed safe refactoring of legacy PHP data paths without regression.
• Reusable Pagination Constructs: Refactored shared Ember.js pagination and interaction logic into reusable mixins, eliminating duplication across contact list views.

Built and operate three MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that expose live system state as callable tools to any MCP client, alongside the Claude Code skills, context-isolated subagents, and commit-time checks that keep agent work bounded and reviewable.

• Bidirectional Knowledge Server: Built ctx-mcp, an MCP server fronting a PostgreSQL knowledge suite that agents both query and write back to, so methodologies and lessons learned in one session are retrievable in the next rather than re-derived.
• Telemetry-Driven Diagnosis: Built o2-mcp, exposing on-demand OpenObserve telemetry (errors, slow spans, failed jobs, distributed traces) as agent-callable tools, so an agent diagnoses a running system from observed behavior instead of inferring from source.
• Context as a Budgeted Resource: Designed context-isolated subagents that keep high-volume audit work out of the main conversation's context window, with per-client registration tooling and pre-commit hooks that reject any agent asset that isn't self-describing.

Designing and building a real-time tactical game platform as a current hands-on laboratory for deterministic systems, product architecture, and controlled AI-assisted engineering.

• Designed a deterministic engine with replayable action logs and server-authoritative state transitions, making complex outcomes reproducible and independently verifiable.
• Built replay validation, adversarial coverage, and CI verification gates so state transitions can be checked across the complete lifecycle.
• Uses controlled agent workflows with bounded tasks, acceptance criteria, automated checks, and human-reviewed outputs rather than treating model output as authority.

Rails 8 platform for multi-source job ingestion, semantic matching, and application automation, built as a working laboratory for local-first LLM orchestration and treating scraped third-party text as hostile input.

• Data Ingestion & Normalization: Built a multi-source Rails ingestion pipeline and PostgreSQL storage schema, unifying fragmented job market datasets for structured downstream analysis.
• Semantic Search & Matching: Implemented vector search embeddings via pgvector, enabling high-precision semantic matching between complex candidate profiles and job requirements.
• Local-First AI Orchestration: Designed a provider-agnostic LLM orchestration layer behind a YAML-driven model registry, local-first by default (llama.cpp/Ollama primary, hosted Claude as fallback), so routine inference never leaves the machine while a stronger hosted model can be selected per call site.
• Prompt Injection Defense: Built a four-stage guardrails pipeline (normalize, weighted heuristic scan, risk classify, output validate) screening every untrusted scraped document before it reaches a model, scoring known injection patterns plus an instruction-density heuristic to secure ingestion against hostile inputs.
• Browser Extension & Lifecycle Capture: Built an MV3 Chrome extension with 16 provider adapters that extracts postings from live ATS pages and captures the full application lifecycle (questions asked and answers given) back into the platform.
• Static Signal Integration: Injected static analysis rules and architectural constraints into model context windows, preventing drift between generated outputs and system security contracts.