Michael Francis
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Experience
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Neon.tech • 2025 - Now
- Led Kubernetes upgrade project
- Wrote application to encrypt volumes in place for mission critical observability platform
- Identified and mitigated various production platform outages
- Early contributor to platform documentation for employee onboarding
Member of Technical Staff
Materialize Inc • 2023 - 2024
- Migrated from x86 to arm64 based instances to save ~30% in compute costs
- Enabled "spill to disk" project which enabled further cost savings
- Improved platform reliability by implementing compute node migration capabilities
Founding Engineer / System Architect
Sproutfi • 2021 - 2023
System Architecture
- Designed a system to prevent data loss, and support developer productivity while scaling from one engineer to twenty engineers
- Built a reliable and easy to operate internal platform that allowed the team to deploy tens of times a day, everyday, automatically (yes even on fridays)
- Enabled our small team of engineers to manage roughly 15 services per engineer with minimal downtime and no sleepless nights
Social Services
- Built a collection of high performance social features in rust, driving user engagement and retention
- Used tools such as Pachyderm, Flink, Materialize and Big Query to analyze user behavior and build recommendation features
Infrastructure Lead
TenX • 2018 - 2021
Blacklistd (Rust)
- System architect and largest individual contributor
- Built a long-lived fast, reliable JWT processor in the critical path of every request to prevent account takeovers
- Launch system that now serves 20k+ users, 200k requests per day, adding <1 ms/request at six-sigma reliability (99.9999%)
Digital Transformation (Kubernetes)
- Created a CI/CD process which started with 10 engineers delivering 1 deploy/2 weeks to a team of 25 engineers continuously deploying (30+ times/day). 500x increase
- Led and recruited a team of 6 people to automate and develop monitoring, reliability testing, network security, secret management and CI/CD
VP of Platform
Swift Medical • 2016 - 2017
Nexus
- Created a event sourced system that processes tens of terabytes per month and synchronizes EMR systems between mobile, desktop and server
- Launched application used across 100,000+ clinics in US and Canada for mission-critical applications in wound care
- Worked with users on-site to debug complex concurrency issues
Cloud Compliance
- Rent BareMetal servers and deploy virtual private cloud for each client
- Create PCI-compliant data localized servers that stay in sync with each other and client's machines
Software Developer
Uniiverse • 2015 - 2016
- Created a graph-based method of social re-engagement to increase user retention and revenue
- Created a bundling mechanism for existing ticket sales product pulling in revenue of $1M+
Software Engineer
Mercatus • 2014
- Developed a scalable, secure PHP API and cross-browser compatible Backbone frontend
- Created and maintained unit-testing framework, improved application session and template management
CTO
Chicory • 2014
- Built, tested and deployed a scalable high performance, clustered web scraper and API
- Designed and implemented webstack, including responsive single page web app
- Interfaced with clients and investors to gather feedback and integrate feature requests into team workflow
Software Engineer
Mobilespa • 2014
- Created PHP Laravel business management tool used by 200+ staff and 10K+ clients per day, saving $400k/year in operations costs
Technologies
React NativeNodeJSKubernetesRustPostgresMySQLPachydermFlinkMaterializeBig QueryFlutterDartGrafanaDatadogPulumiTerraform
Skills
Infrastructure Design & DeploymentMonitoringUnit-testingIntegration testingCI/CDUX researchUser-centric debugging