Mike Hall Staff Software Engineer

I reclaim legacy, revenue-critical systems by making behavior visible, reducing systemic risk, and enabling teams to change safely.

Staff Engineer focused on architecture, production health, and systemic risk for high-volume platforms in regulated environments. I specialize in making complex legacy cores legible and evolvable through observability, incident leadership, and system modeling, ensuring organizational alignment and durable reliability.

What I’m Known For

System Reconstruction: Rebuilding understanding where documentation has drifted from production reality.
Incident-to-Correction: Turning high-severity failures into durable system and process improvements.
Modernization Under Load: Enabling platform evolution without greenfield rewrites or service interruption.
Operational Legibility: Making system behavior transparent to align engineering, security, and product goals.
Structural Intervention: Restructuring execution paths when organization and system models mismatch.

Core Experience

Associate Director, Staff Engineer

2021 – 2026

OneMain Financial | Remote

Owned lane-level architecture and systemic risk for a customer acquisition platform spanning browser, Rails layers, enterprise middleware, and downstream systems in a regulated environment.

Re-architected fragmented engineering ownership into a single accountable operating model by reconstructing end-to-end execution flows, eliminating assumption-driven debugging and enabling reliable change planning across disconnected teams.
Founded and operationalized the ACQ Enablement team to separate platform risk from product delivery, enabling sustained progress on systemic stability without degrading customer-facing velocity.
Converted incident response into a repeatable system of record by establishing trace-driven diagnosis and correction loops, ensuring every major failure resulted in measurable improvements to monitoring and cross-system integration.
Led enterprise adoption of OpenTelemetry, standardizing observability across engineering and cybersecurity to shift teams from intuition-based debugging to shared, trace-based reasoning.
Modernized legacy Rails platform components under continuous production load by re-architecting multi-step workflows and state handling, eliminating data integrity failure modes while maintaining uninterrupted revenue funnel operation.
Established systemic risk management as an explicit engineering responsibility, identifying cross-system failure modes to move the organization from reactive response to proactive reliability engineering.

Senior Software Engineer

2018 – 2021

SK Holdings | Chicago, IL

Modernized and stabilized a shared Rails platform supporting millions of users and high-volume data flows.
Led data-layer remediation by replacing expensive dynamic queries with Materialized Views, reducing system load.

Operating Patterns

Make system behavior legible before prescribing change.
Use incidents as evidence for system correction.
Reduce risk through boundaries and ownership clarity.
Separate delivery from remediation when both are starved.
Favor incremental modernization over speculative rewrites.

Strategic Capabilities

Platform Architecture & Modernization
Distributed Systems & Async Processing
AI-Augmented Engineering & SDLC
System Legibility & Flow Mapping
Systemic Risk Management

Technical Ecosystem

Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS
Sidekiq & Redis, OpenTelemetry
LLM Orchestration (Claude, Gemini, Codex)
PHP, Go, Linux & CI/CD

Technical Leadership

OpenTelemetry Working Group: Founded and led the group to scale trace-based diagnosis site-wide.
Geekfest@OMF: Built a community of practice to share technical standards and accelerate organizational learning.

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