Jesse Michelsen

People manager: 15 engineers across 3 countries and 5 time zones

• Led 15 engineers across 3 countries and 5 time zones; maintained 0% attrition and delivered all committed and stretch roadmap goals through a major organizational restructuring.
• Maintained 99.995% availability across a 10,000-server globally distributed estate through two major parallel infrastructure migrations.
• Delivered $6.3M+ in confirmed savings: SignalFX to Prometheus/Grafana ($700k/year), vendor renegotiations ($2M/year), and a Graviton rearchitecture cutting 30% of a $1M/month compute spend ($3.6M/year).
• Led SignalFX to Prometheus/Grafana migration as a cross-organizational program, directing team leads across 50+ engineers through a year-long APM migration, Prometheus/Grafana rollout, and OpenTelemetry instrumentation, with parallel dual-write validation, full-org training, and DR plans accepted by leadership.
• Led simultaneous SOC 2 and ISO 27001 dual audit: owned end-to-end from annual penetration testing through evidence gathering, auditor review cycles, and remediation. Discovered and remediated abandoned codebase security debt surfaced during audit. Passed both certifications.
• Led Software Maturity Model as a cross-organizational program: formed and chaired a council of team leads to define the framework, directed team leads through org-wide assessment and adoption.
• Owned production RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Redis/Valkey clusters as the shared services layer for product teams; managed self-hosted HashiCorp Vault on Kubernetes for CI/CD and platform access control.
• Built and enforced GitOps delivery with ArgoCD and Terraform; led enterprise AI tooling adoption with role-based access and safety guardrails.

People manager: two concurrent teams, around 20 engineers total

• Eliminated over $1M/year in SLA credit costs by rebuilding incident response, improving observability coverage, and redesigning on-call rotations for time-zone coverage, cutting MTTR from about 30 minutes to under 5.
• Led EC2 to Kubernetes/EKS migration as a cross-organizational program, directing team leads through multi-quarter planning and execution, reducing monthly compute costs by 15% ($150k/month, $1.8M/year).
• Led Splunk to Observe migration as a cross-organizational program, directing team leads across a dozen teams over multiple quarters and driving full engineering org training. $500k/year saved.
• Owned infrastructure execution of Transition Service Agreements (TSAs) during the EdgeCast-to-Edgio merger: interpreted contractual mandates, built roadmaps against externally imposed legal timelines, and selected replacement solutions across all affected infrastructure systems.
• Ran a five-person performance engineering team load testing at 10M concurrent users; built self-service canary/branch environments and ephemeral per-pipeline-run environments for production parity.
• Standardized CI/CD, deployment orchestration, and IaC; established OKRs, career ladders, and quarterly planning.

Individual contributor

• Built and maintained tooling for a 10,000-server globally distributed estate requiring granular permissions and detailed observability.
• Led the EC2 to Kubernetes/EKS migration: built the platform with Helm and Terraform from scratch, function- and performance-tested, with coordinated production cutovers under high-uptime requirements.
• Rearchitected SaltStack configuration management infrastructure, redesigning desired-state management and convergence patterns across the globally distributed 10,000-server estate.
• Maintained CI/CD continuity across five platform transitions (GitLab, Jenkins, Screwdriver, GitHub, GitLab), building a self-service reusable template library at each.
• Owned self-hosted HashiCorp Vault on Kubernetes for CI/CD and developer-tooling authentication; built SSO flows and RBAC for internal platform services.
• Chaired the change advisory board governing deployment standards across the 10,000-server estate; established platform security review processes that grew in scope through Edgio and Uplynk into a full org-wide governance function.

Technical lead: directed 20+ engineers over tenure (interns through architects)

• Provided technical leadership to 20+ engineers over tenure, owning onboarding, documentation, training, architecture, and CI/CD from MVP through production rollout.
• Built and led a multi-cohort intern program: designed the curriculum and coding exam and mentored engineers from intern through senior and staff level. 100% full-time conversion, with alumni who have since become a Senior Manager and a Fortune 500 VP; all intern projects shipped to production.
• Built the Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) platform from a monolith feature into a standalone service; owned architecture, ad-server integrations, and scaling.
• Led the Vagrant to Docker to Kubernetes modernization: dockerized a dozen-plus applications and built the Kubernetes/EKS platform from scratch under 99.995% uptime requirements.
• Built the original ephemeral CI/CD environment system with local/CI parity, eliminating "works on my machine" failures org-wide; created an internal API standard adopted across the org.