Jesse Michelsen

For the last decade I've led the platform and reliability function for a globally distributed video infrastructure company, through its evolution from VDMS to EdgeCast, Edgio, and Uplynk, as both a technical lead and an engineering manager.

Security and identity sit at the center of how I run platforms: my team owned and operated a self-hosted HashiCorp Vault platform on Kubernetes for years, with zero-trust authentication for CI/CD pipelines and workloads (machine identity without static secrets), least-privilege and RBAC, and passed SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.

I build teams and systems that stay quiet under pressure: deep observability, disciplined incident response, GitOps delivery, and relentless cost engineering. I lead from close to the work, hands-on with the pipelines, observability configs, and containers my teams rely on, and I grow people, having mentored engineers from intern to senior and staff.

Away from the day job, I am usually still building. I run a homelab that self-hosts a small fleet of sites and services for myself, my family, and a few friends, which scratches the same platform-ownership and own-your-data itch as the work, except here I am also the one who gets paged. That same curiosity turns up in stranger places. The first time I ever drank coffee, I treated it as a system to reverse-engineer, holding the grind, water temperature, and steep time steady and moving one variable a day, taking notes on everything from the flavor to my own focus and sleep, until I could actually explain why anyone likes the stuff. Writing, and building games and small apps as an artist-coder, come from the same place: the fastest way I know to understand something is to build it, or take it apart.