Hi, I’m Michael (He/Him/His).

I am a passionate engineer committed to solving hard problems using the latest technologies while maintaining high standards for quality and maintainability.

Specializing in distributed systems, I am a big proponent of cloud infrastructure and containerization technologies. I believe that leveraging the cloud, we are freed up to focus on the most important aspects of our projects; the components that differentiate and drive business value.

I primarily focus on backend systems and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), where my expertise in cloud architecture and experience building multi-region redundant systems comes into play. I believe in designing with the expectation of system failure and building redundancy into every project. I strive for simple solutions, preferring to focus on maintainability and modularity over ‘clever’ solutions.

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. – C.A.R. Hoare

Remember that there is no code faster than no code. – Kevlin Henney

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. – Brian Kernighan

Originally from rural southern Illinois, I now work remotely out of the Duluth, Minnesota area.

Product Experience

  • Designing and implementing high-throughput, event driven systems operating at huge scales in the Anti-fraud and Ad-tech spaces
  • Building cloud abstractions via IaC for other development teams to leverage for their applications
  • Building custom Terraform and Pulumi providers to allow use of 1st-party internal services via IaC
  • Experience integrating Machine Learning models into production systems

Technical Experience

  • 12+ years of experience in software development
  • 3+ years experience leading a team of 4+ software engineers (technical team lead)
  • Previously a tech lead over 2 engineer teams (10+ engineers) responsible for architectural roadmap (30-50% coding)
  • Experienced building cloud native services as well as traditional on-premise applications
  • Have experience building and maintaining IaC providers (Pulumi & Terraform)

Current stack

  • Golang micro-services leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes (EKS and self-hosted)
  • Serverless with Lambda and API Gateway where it makes sense
  • Event driven architectures using AWS Kinesis, Kafka, and NSQ
  • Infrastructure defined and managed by Pulumi and Terraform

Projects

Check out my latest projects on GitHub or my latest musings on my blog

Interested in hiring me?

I’m not currently looking for new opportunities. However, if you have a particularly interesting role, please reach out. Do note that I only consider remote positions.

For recruiting inquiries, please send details to michael+hire@rbnsn.dev. Include your full contact details and a description of the position. Alternatively you can contact me via LinkedIn. Mention the code word “pumpernickel” to not be filtered out as automated recruiter spam.