# Mike Hall
Staff Software Engineer

## Summary
I am a Staff Software Engineer rooted in the profession of software engineering. I work
at multiple levels of software engineering, from code and runtime behavior through
business and organizational boundaries. I work with and across teams of individual
contributors to turn business objectives into clear technical decisions, safer change,
and durable ownership. As a Staff Engineer, I use evidence to make complex production
software easier to understand and help teams accomplish the work that matters.

## Skills
- Cross-Team Technical Leadership
- Platform Architecture & Legacy Modernization
- Production Systems & Reliability
- Architecture Discovery & Technical Debt Reduction
- Incident Response & Root Cause Analysis
- Observability & OpenTelemetry
- Distributed Systems & Async Processing
- Data Integrity & Performance
- Platform Enablement & Developer Productivity
- AI-Augmented Engineering & Automation
- LLM Orchestration & MCP Tooling
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQL & SQL
- Sidekiq & Redis
- AWS, Kubernetes & Docker
- CI/CD

## Experience

### Associate Director, Staff Engineer at OneMain Financial
**January 2021 - February 2026**

Software Engineer and architecture lead who recovered lost knowledge and made it
actionable, helping make regulated customer workflows easier to understand, safer to
change, and more observable across organizational boundaries.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Mapped the loan acquisition and origination pipeline end-to-end from visit to booked
  loan across browser, mainframe, and Affiliate API, identifying seven distinct lending
  funnels.
- Built data-risk remediation and architecture-discovery practices that made legacy
  dependencies visible and safer to change.
- Diagnosed a production state-management defect affecting application completion and
  moved the system to a more durable session design without interrupting service.
- Established distributed observability across application and integration boundaries,
  improving the evidence available during incident response.
- Built communities of practice, mentoring loops, and handoff mechanisms that
  distributed technical ownership beyond a single engineer.

**Skills:** Cross-Team Technical Leadership, Platform Architecture, Legacy
Modernization, Architecture Discovery, Dependency Mapping, System Resilience, Incident
Leadership, DynamoDB, Observability, OpenTelemetry, Distributed Systems, Ruby on Rails,
PostgreSQL, AWS

### Senior Backend Developer at SK Holdings, Inc.
**January 2019 - December 2020**

Software Engineer focused on backend stability, performance, and safe modernization for
high-traffic Rails products.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Improved search and asynchronous delivery systems while production traffic continued
  to flow.
- Led framework and database upgrades with a staged approach designed to protect service
  continuity.

**Skills:** Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Full-Text Search, Redis, Sidekiq, SendGrid Async
Pipelines, Data Analytics & SQL, CI/CD, System Observability, Backend Architecture

### Senior Software Developer at ActiveCampaign
**September 2018 - December 2018**

Software Engineer on a large CRM platform, focused on testability, performance, and
safer change inside a legacy backend.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Replaced fragile data-access patterns with structured, testable queries and improved
  performance.
- Strengthened automated verification around core customer workflows, enabling safer
  refactoring.

**Skills:** PHP, MySQL, Ember.js, JavaScript, Legacy System Modernization, Backend
System Architecture, Automated Testing, Performance Optimization

### Principal Architect at Local AI Orchestration & Developer Runtime
**January 2026 - Present**

Built local-first tools that help engineers and AI systems work with clear context
boundaries, observable behavior, and human-reviewed change.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Built tools that make technical context reusable across sessions without treating
  generated output as authority.
- Added observable diagnostics and bounded review steps to keep automated engineering
  work understandable and reversible.

**Skills:** Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agentic Workflow Design, Claude Code,
Anthropic API, LLM Tool Design, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, OpenObserve, llama.cpp,
whisper.cpp, Local Inference, PHI Scrubbing & Compliance, Ruby

### Principal Architect at Phalanx Duel
**January 2022 - Present**

Building a real-time tactical game as a laboratory for deterministic systems, product
architecture, and carefully bounded AI-assisted engineering.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Designed replayable state transitions so complex outcomes remain reproducible and
  independently reviewable.
- Built verification gates that test system behavior across the full lifecycle.

**Skills:** TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, WebSockets, API Design, Distributed
Systems, Deterministic Simulation, CI/CD, System Verification, AI-Augmented Development

### Principal Architect at WWWorkRemote
**January 2021 - Present**

Building a Rails platform for structured research, semantic search, and human-directed
automation.

**Key Outcomes:**
- Unified fragmented sources into a searchable data model for downstream analysis.
- Designed local-first AI workflows with explicit safety boundaries around untrusted
  input and sensitive context.

**Skills:** Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, pgvector, Vector Search & Embeddings, LLM
Orchestration, Prompt Injection Defense, Local Inference, Chrome Extensions (MV3), API
Design, Data Pipelines, System Design, OpenTelemetry, Distributed Systems