Mike Hall

Owned lane-level architecture for the Acquisitions platform, spanning customer application flows, partner integrations, and a large legacy application estate in a regulated financial environment. Operated as a senior individual contributor accountable for architectural integrity, production stability, and cross-team execution, with authority established through incident leadership, deep system knowledge, and cross-team trust. Focused on making system behavior observable and understandable across teams to enable data-driven decisions, reduce systemic risk, and support reliable change in long-lived systems.

• Acted as the final escalation point for high-severity production incidents, taking ownership of live diagnosis during large cross-functional calls, coordinating investigation across teams, establishing a shared understanding of system behavior, and driving concrete action plans with clear follow-up ownership.
• Transformed incident response into institutional learning by ensuring every major failure resulted in improved monitoring, clarified ownership, updated documentation, refined operational processes, and corrected cross-team touchpoints across systems with decades of accumulated history.
• Reconstructed end-to-end customer acquisition flows by mapping execution context from the customer’s browser through application layers, enterprise service middleware, and downstream business systems, creating an authoritative operational model to ground incident response, risk review, and change planning in observed reality.
• Designed and delivered a re-architecture of session state handling across complex, multi-step user workflows, eliminating a persistent integrity failure mode that impaired customer tracking, diagnosis, and incident recovery under real production conditions.
• Founded and led the OpenTelemetry Working Group, establishing shared observability standards and training engineering and cybersecurity teams to reason about system behavior using common telemetry; transitioned ownership once practices were institutionalized and adoption became self-sustaining.
• Led platform modernization and lifecycle remediation under continuous production load, maintaining regulatory compliance while reducing operational risk and restoring the ability to safely evolve legacy systems.
• Re-architected fragmented engineering ownership into a single accountable operating model, clarifying architectural responsibility and escalation paths as a necessary consequence of observed production realities.
• Founded an enablement function to isolate cross-cutting platform, risk, and remediation work from feature delivery, enabling sustained progress on long-horizon stability initiatives without disrupting customer-facing teams.

Skills: Platform Architecture, System Resilience, Incident Leadership, Observability, Legacy System Modernization, Distributed Systems, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, AWS