# Mike Hall **Staff Software Engineer / Platform & Enablement Lead** Chicago, IL - Email: [mike@just3ws.com](mailto:mike@just3ws.com) - Phone: [(847) 877-3825](tel:+18478773825) - Website: [just3ws.com](https://www.just3ws.com) - LinkedIn: [linkedin.com/in/just3ws/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/just3ws/) - GitHub: [github.com/just3ws](https://github.com/just3ws) --- ## Professional Summary Staff Software Engineer and Platform Lead who multiplies engineering velocity and system reliability. Proven track record of merging attrition-impacted teams into high-performing units, founding developer enablement teams, building automated verification gates, and unblocking product teams from technical debt friction. --- ## Core Competencies & Skills Platform Enablement & Developer Productivity, Team Consolidation, Mentorship & Attrition Rescue, Automated Verification Gates & CI/CD Pipelines, Architecture Discovery & Technical Debt Reduction, Distributed Tracing & Service Legibility, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL & Event-Driven Systems, Test-Driven Development (TDD) & Clean Refactoring, Incident Leadership & Blameless Post-Mortems --- ## Experience & Leadership ### Associate Director, Staff Engineer at OneMain Financial **January 2021 - February 2026** | Remote **Target Focus:** Merged two attrition-impacted teams into one unified delivery unit in the Acquisition Lane; founded ACQ Enablement to insulate core engineering health, documentation, and PII/fraud remediation from feature roadmap pressure. **Key Outcomes:** - Technical Leadership & Team Consolidation: Progressed from Digital Origination Team Lead to Software Architect for the Acquisition Lane, merging two attrition-impacted teams into a unified, high-functioning engineering unit before converting to Associate Director, Staff Engineer upon corporate architecture track restructuring. - ACQ Enablement Founding & Engineering Mandates: Founded and technically led the ACQ Enablement team to protect core engineering concerns from product feature pressure: driving platform stabilization, legacy modernization, system process mapping, architecture documentation, PII remediation, and fraud investigations. - Observability & Enterprise Trace: Founded and led the OpenTelemetry Working Group (OTel WG) to establish the Enterprise Trace across high-volume customer acquisition flows, connecting a complex Rails distributed monolith, MuleSoft, and IBM mainframe backends to eliminate blind spots and align engineering around real-time service maps. - AI-Augmented Systems Investigation: Introduced privacy-conscious local AI workflows for legacy code analysis and engineering support, expanding investigative capacity while keeping human review, security constraints, and source evidence explicit. ### Development Manager — Founder Transition & Acquisition Handoff at EMR-Bear, a MedSuite company **May 2026 - August 2026** | Remote **Target Focus:** Established deployment verification gates blocking unvalidated changes prior to HIPAA review; unified distributed U.S.-Mexico engineering rhythms. **Key Outcomes:** - Architecture Discovery & Operational Risk Assessment: Built a rapid 90-day system inventory and risk model spanning application codepaths, infrastructure dependencies, access boundaries, and operational risks. - Production & Compliance Governance: Established release verification gates across the deployment pipeline of a platform servicing 130+ clinics, blocking unvalidated changes prior to HIPAA compliance review and business sign-off. ### Senior Backend Developer at SK Holdings, Inc. **January 2019 - December 2020** | Chicago, IL **Target Focus:** Standardized asynchronous Sidekiq delivery pipelines and automated CI/CD deployment routines. **Key Outcomes:** - Search Infrastructure Simplification: Replaced legacy external search clusters (Sphinx) with native MySQL full-text search and optimized relational indices, eliminating external service dependencies and reducing platform infrastructure footprint. - Zero-Downtime Platform Upgrades: Led Ruby and Rails framework upgrades across multiple core applications, sequencing database migrations and dependency updates to maintain uptime during platform modernization. ### Principal Consultant at Tandem **August 2018 - August 2018** | Chicago, IL **Target Focus:** Led client architecture modernizations, pairing and mentoring engineering teams in TDD, automated testing discipline, and continuous delivery. **Key Outcomes:** - Conducted an on-site, end-to-end operational walkthrough at military processing facilities (Des Plaines MEPS), identifying critical disconnects between enlistment workflows and proposed software models. - Evaluated program viability and delivered definitive architectural recommendations directly to executive leadership, mitigating severe contractual and delivery risks. ### Software Engineer at Obtiva **August 2009 - July 2011** | Chicago, IL **Target Focus:** Delivered high-stakes consulting architectures, training client teams in Ruby on Rails, agile delivery rhythms, and software craftsmanship. **Key Outcomes:** - Built self-service reporting platforms for Leapfrog Online, allowing business stakeholders to query and export data warehouse analytics without engineering bottlenecks. - Developed commercial B2B sales and product catalog services for Sears, opening new enterprise revenue channels. - Engineered deal-processing services and fraud analysis pipelines at Groupon, stabilizing backend transaction infrastructure during extreme hyper-growth. --- ## Selected Production Projects ### Creator (Agent Tooling (MCP Servers & Agent Workflows)) **2026 - Present** Built and operate three MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that expose live system state as callable tools to any MCP client, alongside the Claude Code skills, context-isolated subagents, and commit-time checks that keep agent work bounded and reviewable. - Bidirectional Knowledge Server: Built ctx-mcp, an MCP server fronting a PostgreSQL knowledge suite that agents both query and write back to, so methodologies and lessons learned in one session are retrievable in the next rather than re-derived. - Telemetry-Driven Diagnosis: Built o2-mcp, exposing on-demand OpenObserve telemetry (errors, slow spans, failed jobs, distributed traces) as agent-callable tools, so an agent diagnoses a running system from observed behavior instead of inferring from source. - Context as a Budgeted Resource: Designed context-isolated subagents that keep high-volume audit work out of the main conversation's context window, with per-client registration tooling and pre-commit hooks that reject any agent asset that isn't self-describing. ### Creator & Forensic Engineer (Technical Conversation Archive) **2011 - Present** Recorded, and later restored, an archive of 214 technical interviews with practitioners from the Ruby, JVM, and Software Craftsmanship movements, using a local-only AI pipeline to transcribe, structure, and cross-link two decades of primary-source material into a searchable knowledge graph. - Local-Only AI Restoration Pipeline: Built a Whisper and local-LLM pipeline that transcribes, diarizes, and structures long-form interview audio entirely on-device, keeping a large private media corpus off third-party inference services. - Schema-Validated Content Platform: Runs on a contract-validated data layer: every interview, asset, and transcript is checked against an explicit schema at build time, with referential-integrity checks that fail the build rather than publishing broken data. - Semantic Cross-Linking & Taxonomy Generation: Generates a topic taxonomy, knowledge graph, and semantic cross-links across the corpus, turning an unstructured media archive into navigable, individually indexed pages. - Primary-Source Capture: Conducted the original interviews on-site at GOTO Conference, Software Craftsmanship North America, RailsConf, and WindyCityRails, with practitioners including Dave Thomas, Stuart Halloway, Corey Haines, Sandro Mancuso, and Micah Martin. - Digital Archaeology: Recovered and reconstructed material from defunct platforms and web archives, reconciling incomplete metadata across sources to restore provenance for recordings that would otherwise have been lost. ### Creator (WWWorkRemote) **2021 - Present** Rails 8 platform for multi-source job ingestion, semantic matching, and application automation, built as a working laboratory for local-first LLM orchestration and treating scraped third-party text as hostile input. - Data Ingestion & Normalization: Built a multi-source Rails ingestion pipeline and PostgreSQL storage schema, unifying fragmented job market datasets for structured downstream analysis. - Semantic Search & Matching: Implemented vector search embeddings via pgvector, enabling high-precision semantic matching between complex candidate profiles and job requirements. - Local-First AI Orchestration: Designed a provider-agnostic LLM orchestration layer behind a YAML-driven model registry, local-first by default (llama.cpp/Ollama primary, hosted Claude as fallback), so routine inference never leaves the machine while a stronger hosted model can be selected per call site. - Prompt Injection Defense: Built a four-stage guardrails pipeline (normalize, weighted heuristic scan, risk classify, output validate) screening every untrusted scraped document before it reaches a model, scoring known injection patterns plus an instruction-density heuristic to secure ingestion against hostile inputs. - Browser Extension & Lifecycle Capture: Built an MV3 Chrome extension with 16 provider adapters that extracts postings from live ATS pages and captures the full application lifecycle (questions asked and answers given) back into the platform. - Static Signal Integration: Injected static analysis rules and architectural constraints into model context windows, preventing drift between generated outputs and system security contracts. --- ## Additional Experience - **Senior Software Developer**, BenchPrep (March 2017 - February 2018): Owned enterprise assessment workflows, leading correctness and platform security in a high-concurrency environment. - **Senior Software Developer**, ReachLocal (March 2015 - November 2016): Owned API design and modernization strategy, leading incremental legacy migration for a high-volume digital marketing platform. - **Open-Source Transition Lead**, Coderwall (January 2014 - December 2014): Hired as a contractor by the founder to lead the open-source transition of the Coderwall developer reputation platform, a Y Combinator-backed professional network for software engineers (856 GitHub stars, 304 forks). Delivered security hardening, proprietary service extraction, infrastructure modernization, and community leadership as the top contributor to the open-source codebase. - **Engineering Learning & Development Business Partner**, Groupon (July 2011 - May 2013): Owned core backend systems for fraud and taxonomy, leading global engineering enablement during hyper-growth. --- ## Career Foundations **1999 - 2011** Built and operated enterprise integrations, transactional systems, and early web products across consulting and product organizations, establishing the production discipline and community-centered craftsmanship that still shape my leadership. - **Revenue-critical commerce**: Designed real-time inventory, locking, and fulfillment services for a high-volume ticket marketplace later acquired by a major industry operator. - **Consulting and software craftsmanship**: Delivered systems across client environments while mentoring engineers, adopting Ruby and Rails, and helping build Chicago's craftsmanship community. - **Enterprise and operational systems**: Built integration and operational software across large organizations, grounded in .NET, SQL, messaging, production support, and direct user needs.