Mike Hall
Staff Software Engineer
- Location Chicago, IL
- Email mike@just3ws.com
- Phone (847) 877-3825
- Web just3ws.com
- LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/just3ws/
- GitHub github.com/just3ws
Summary
Staff software engineer who stabilizes revenue-critical platforms, reduces systemic risk, and makes complex systems understandable enough for teams to change safely. Strongest in platform architecture, legacy modernization, observability, incident leadership, and cross-team execution across Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL systems. Known for turning production ambiguity into clear operating models, durable remediation plans, and safer delivery.
Core Skills
- Platform Architecture
- Technical Strategy
- Legacy Modernization
- Reliability Engineering
- Incident Leadership
- Observability Strategy
- Cross-Team Technical Leadership
- Risk Reduction
- Platform Enablement
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQL
- OpenTelemetry
Experience
Associate Director, Staff Engineer
Owned architecture, production health, and systemic risk for a revenue-critical acquisition platform in a regulated financial environment.
- Served as the final escalation point for high-severity production incidents, leading cross-team diagnosis and driving remediation plans with clear ownership.
- Reconstructed end-to-end customer acquisition flows across browser, application, middleware, and downstream business systems, giving teams an authoritative operating model for incident response and change planning.
- Re-architected session state handling in multi-step application flows, removing a persistent integrity failure mode affecting customer tracking and incident recovery.
- Founded and led the OpenTelemetry Working Group, establishing shared observability standards adopted across engineering and cybersecurity teams.
- Created an enablement function that separated platform risk and remediation work from feature delivery, sustaining long-horizon stability improvements.
Senior Backend Developer
Stabilized and modernized a shared Rails platform supporting multiple digital properties, millions of users, and high-volume data flows.
- Upgraded Ruby and Rails across multiple applications, reducing technical debt, security exposure, and long-term maintenance risk.
- Built data pipelines synchronizing millions of records between internal systems and third-party services to support high-volume operations.
- Replaced expensive dynamic queries with materialized views and moved session and cache load from MySQL to Redis, improving performance under load.
- Optimized CI by reordering and parallelizing test execution, shortening feedback cycles and improving delivery throughput.
Senior Software Developer
Improved correctness, performance, and security for enterprise assessment workflows where calculation accuracy and response integrity were business-critical.
- Eliminated assessment calculation errors by analyzing and tuning critical PostgreSQL queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE and query-planning tools.
- Implemented JWT-based response verification and once-only processing to prevent tampering and strengthen trust in assessment outcomes.
- Designed a secure cross-origin communication API for embedded client applications and reduced high-concurrency bottlenecks in assessment workflows.
Additional Experience
- Senior Software Developer, ActiveCampaign : Improved testability, performance, and change safety inside a tightly coupled CRM core.
- Senior Software Developer, ReachLocal : De-risked a large legacy rewrite by proposing an incremental modernization strategy built around API boundaries.
- CTO, KloboMedia : Built and delivered a social media analytics platform as technical co-founder and CTO.
- Core Team Lead, Coderwall : Relaunched the platform as open source and modernized background jobs and data storage to reduce cost and improve maintainability.
Earlier Experience
Built enterprise systems, startup platforms, and revenue-critical fulfillment services across consulting, product, and operational environments.
- TicketsNow: Designed and delivered a real-time inventory locking and order fulfillment service that generated more than $2 million in annual revenue.
- Groupon and Obtiva: Led onboarding, mentoring, and engineering enablement work while delivering backend systems in high-growth and consultancy environments.
- BrightStar, Motorola, BP, and earlier enterprise roles: Built integration and operational systems across large organizations with a foundation in .NET, SQL, and production support.