Michael Wimpee - Résumé

Professional Summary

I'm an extremely versatile startup veteran with 15+ years experience in development, devops, and management.

A critical part of every team I've joined, I try to work on whichever project in whichever role will be most impactful, prioritizing important work over sexy work.

Employment History

Principal Engineer
Kit Check
September 2019-October 2020

Trusted by management to tackle problems as I saw fit. Directed, estimated, and scheduled my own projects. Built and shipped a new product while improving performance of existing ones. Worked primarily in Ruby and Java with some C and Python.

Achievements:

Created RFID scanning software running on cGMP-conformant pharmaceutical production lines.
Worked within a cGMP process to create a Ruby on Rails API for drug manufacturers to track medications.
Rooted the EOLed FX9500 RFID scanner and created custom firmware (which the manufacturer was unable to do).
Sped up interpretation of a common RFID scan use case by ~1000x.
Implemented a dynamic duration RFID scan to maintain accuracy while reducing average scan times.
Delivered a large number of core product features.
Part of the team that won Kit Check's "Redefine Possible" Core Value award.

Development Manager
Kit Check
October 2018-September 2019

Led the Kit Check development team and worked with Chief Product Officer to stabilize the development organization during a time of transition. Developed the team through hiring, coaching, and evaluation and owned all development decisions (eg task assignment, technical priorities, and architecture) for the Kit Check product.

Achievements:

Overhauled sprint retrospectives to focus on process improvement.
Revamped daily standups to improve engagement and better deliver on our promises.
Hired four developers.
Created an indoor bocce court.
Won Kit Check's "Dive In" Core Value award for contributions to company culture.

Software Engineer/DevOps Lead
Kit Check
July 2014-October 2018

Held complete responsiblity for Kit Check's production, test, and deployment infrastructure (architecture, scaling, monitoring, deployment, security, cost management, etc). CloudFormation templates controlled the VPCs, Autoscaling Groups, Spot Instances, Load Balancers, etc. Chef ensured correctness of individual instances. Created SSL and VPN infrastructure for securing connections between hospital customers and Kit Check. Contributed to core product as a software engineer.

Achievements:

No significant downtime events.
Scratch-built company's Production/QA/Staging infrastructure.
Implemented infrastructure-as-code, replacing manually created resources.
Migrated to new environment without customer-facing downtime.
Created operating system environment for embedded linux devices used in operating rooms.
Won Kit Check's "Get Shit Done" Core Value award for tireless output.

DevOps Lead
SocialRadar
September 2013-July 2014

Lead DevOps engineer managing all aspects of the company's availability, scaling, automation, monitoring, and deployment tools. Company SME on a range of technologies including Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, and Chef.

Achievements:

Incorporated spot instances and autoscaling to reduce costs and dynamically scale services.
Created and integrated tools for monitoring and telemetry of all environments.
Developed system for managing entire EC2/VPC environments through a single revision controlled file.
Introduced Chef for automatically provisioning new hosts and managing existing systems.
Migrated ad-hoc EC2 deployment to structured and secure VPC environment.
Transitioned company from on-premise singleton Jenkins CI to cloud-hosted Travis CI.

Software Engineer, Engineering Lead, and Operations Lead
ARO (formerly Kiha Software)
February 2011-September 2013

Founding Java/Operations engineer at startup helping to manage contextual information and create a diary that writes itself. Responsible for engineering, infrastructure, and operations written in Java and Ruby.

Achievements:

Wrote Java annotations and AOP aspects to enable elegant system-wide caching and metric collection.
Created company's monitoring, trending, and configuration management systems.
Managed company's entire AWS footprint.
Wrote and supported Java CXF web services.
Helped ideate and develop the company's products from the outset.

Senior Operations Engineer
Kiha Software
February 2010-February 2011

DevOps engineer and software developer for startup using semantic extraction to improve the mobile experience. Managed 250+ autoscaling EC2 instances running several environments (dev, prod, etc). Maintained the company's MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and SwiftMQ clusters.

Achievements:

Migrated 60+ node cloud deployment to a two node traditional datacenter deployment and back again.
Worked with ATT to deploy our application in ATT datacenters for executive evaluation.
Supported all operational aspects of Kiha's initial product launch and public beta.
Wrote ad-hoc reports and analysis to find and mitigate scaling issues.

Senior Engineer, Operations and Development
Emicus/US Emergency Operations Center
April 2009-January 2010

Founding software engineer working on operations and development for startup focused on helping the public during natural disasters. Wholly responsible for systems architecture and infrastructure. Involved in all aspects of technology choices, design, and implementation.

Achievements:

Helped design and build Ruby on Rails/Java website from first check-in to production in ten weeks.
Created production and corporate infrastructure using Amazon Web Services, Google Apps and other open source tools.
Leveraged EC2, S3, CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancing to ensure scalability and availability of our product.
Member of FEMA grand-prize winning team at Random Hacks of Kindness #0.

Production Operations Manager
Marchex
April 2007-April 2009

Responsible for the systems engineering and operations of all Marchex applications in production. Applications ran on hundreds of servers in multiple datacenters and handled in excess of a billion daily requests and hundreds of thousands of domains. Managed team of 2–12 system engineers. Powerful voice in choosing and advocating the technical direction of the product team.

Achievements:

Conceived and built an in-house query expansion service. Saved ~$1M annually on service expenses in addition to providing higher revenue and more relevant results.
Filled in as senior network engineer and project manager during production IP migration.
Managed many large-scale application migrations, upgrades and build-outs.

Production Applications Team Lead/Senior Systems Administrator
Marchex
June 2005-April 2007

Designed system solutions to improve system availability, capacity and scalability. Helped engineering team build and maintain the company's core ad serving platform. Supported the daily operations of two advertising platforms serving >1 billion daily queries. Monitored product availability and resource usage. Planned system and feature upgrades. Provided technical leadership in design and administration decisions for production networks and applications. Assigned projects to team members and monitored progress.

Achievements:

Migrated main advertising platform between datacenters exactly according to the submitted plan—a project success described by the CTO as "world class."
Planned and executed several downtime-free load balancer and server upgrades and migrations.
Guided operational design of company's direct navigation platform.
Helped stabilize new product and reduce alarms from more than a thousand a month to tens while increasing service check coverage.

Systems Administrator
University of Washington
February 2004-June 2005

Administered complex computing environment in support of a large research lab. Leveraged OpenAFS and Kerberos to provide a secure unified authentication and data access environment. Managed backup system for 10+ terabytes of data. Monitored resource usage and planned for scaling an environment where computational needs and dataset size grew rapidly.

Achievements:

Fully automated desktop and server deployment and maintenance system using Kickstart and CFengine.
Automated local caching and installation of OS patches for Linux systems with YUM.
Built and maintained a clustered genomic database using Clustered JDBC and PostgreSQL. Improved database performance by an order of magnitude and spare CPU time was used for general purpose batch jobs.

Education

B.A. in Physics (minor in Chemistry)
Whitman College