Ethan Michel

About Ethan Michel

Full-stack developer with broad technical experience and a demonstrated ability to learn quickly, think creatively, and thrive outside my comfort zone. I’m a curious, lifelong learner who takes pride in embracing the ethos of every team I join.At Capital One, I’ve led cross-functional development efforts across cloud, backend, frontend, and authentication infrastructure. Most recently, I designed a secure and performant warm handoff login experience spanning the frontend, backend, and middleware layers—all within a complex AWS ecosystem.I bring 4 years of software engineering experience with production contributions across diverse tech stacks: Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, JavaScript, SQL, NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), Docker, and more. I also have extensive experience working with AWS.Outside of work, I’m a soccer player since childhood, avid cyclist and skier, and an (very) amateur philosopher who enjoys asking “why” almost as much as “how.”

Experience

1. Software Engineer

   Capital One

   Aug 2023 — Present · Chicago, IL, US

   Secured Card Moonfish Team (September 2024 - Present)As part of a multi-year enterprise migration to central infrastructure, I’ve led several critical platform integrations within Capital One’s Moonfish team. Highlights include designing and implementing a “warm handoff” authentication system that enables seamless user login to App Center via secure, one-time tokens. I also architected and delivered a new orchestration workflow in a central system to generate dynamic, context-aware funding portal URLs. This workflow is scaled via Optimizely feature flags and supports downstream systems like email and letter generation.In these efforts, I’ve acted as lead developer and primary point of contact across multiple internal platform teams, delivering production code in Java, Golang, Python, React, Postgres, and DynamoDB. and contributing across the full stack—from backend orchestration and AWS cloud infrastructure (Lambda, Fargate, Aurora, SQS, Dynamodb, etc) to frontend integration.Trade Credit Settlements Team (September 2023 - September 2024)On the Trade Credit Settlements team, I led multiple efforts to modernize and stabilize Capital One’s legacy Partner File Delivery (PFD) infrastructure. I drove platform improvements across Scala, Spark (EMR), Airflow, and Spring Boot systems that reduced daily manual intervention by over 90%. I also built QA testing pipelines, implemented encryption workflows for secure file testing, and fixed critical logging and infrastructure gaps—enabling confident deployments and significantly improving the team’s ability to debug and recover from failures.As a lead contributor, I coordinated cross-team workstreams, including migrating ownership of key Lambdas (Disputes, COPP) and enabling cross-account communication and deployment. I became the team’s SME on disputes processing and Airflow-based orchestration, authored documentation to unblock future work, and introduced failover automation that cut Airflow DAG recovery time by 90%

Education

• Oberlin College

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science