Michael Dere

About Michael Dere

I’m a senior engineering leader and Site Reliability Engineer with a foundation in building software across the stack — from APIs and microservices to user-facing applications. That hands-on background shapes how I lead today: I design platforms, systems, and delivery environments that work for the engineers who rely on them every day.Over the past several years, I’ve led teams responsible for CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and internal platforms that enable engineering organizations to build, test, deploy, and operate software at scale. I focus on removing friction, increasing reliability, and setting a high technical bar while still enabling teams to move quickly and independently.As an SRE, I’m cloud-agnostic by design and deeply interested in hard systems problems — scale, resilience, failure modes, and architectural tradeoffs. I enjoy working at the intersection of software engineering and operations, where good judgment, strong fundamentals, and simple designs matter more than rigid process.I care deeply about engineering quality, sound decision-making, and building environments where talented engineers can do their best work with clarity, ownership, and minimal unnecessary complexity.

Experience

1. Director of Engineering Senior Engineering Leader

   LightFeather

   Apr 2021 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Senior Engineering Leader with 10+ years of experience across Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and CI/CD modernization, building and operating large-scale cloud platforms in regulated, high-trust environments.I lead platform and infrastructure engineering across multiple teams, managing and mentoring engineers while setting technical standards for reliability, security, and delivery. I’ve owned shared delivery platforms supporting 100+ services, simplified build and deployment workflows into self-service systems, and led CI/CD modernization efforts that reduced build times from ~20 minutes to ~8 minutes. My work has directly supported proposal and delivery efforts contributing to $100M+ in awarded contracts.Core focus areas- Platform Engineering and Developer Enablement- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and distributed systems- CI/CD pipeline design, optimization, and standardization- Cloud infrastructure on AWS with Kubernetes (EKS) and Docker- Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and CloudFormation- Observability, performance and capacity planning- Security and compliance in regulated environmentsI’ve designed event-driven serverless architectures using API Gateway and Lambda, built containerized platforms on EKS and EC2, and integrated e-commerce systems such as Stripe into production environments with a strong emphasis on operational excellence.Earlier in my career, I worked as a frontend JavaScript and React engineer, building user-facing applications and backend APIs. That background shapes how I lead today — designing platforms with a deep understanding of developer experience and end-to-end delivery.I’m most effective in roles where I can combine hands-on technical judgment with people leadership to build high-autonomy teams and platforms engineers trust to run critical workloads at scale.

Education

• South Seattle College

  Associate of Science, Engineering

• University of Washington

  BSME, Mechanical Engineer

  2008 — 2011

Skills

• Mysql
• Systems Engineering
• Autocad
• Matlab
• Phpmyadmin
• Sql
• Cnc Mill
• Css
• Finite Element Analysis
• Nanotechnology
• Technical Writing
• Html
• Javascript
• Simulations
• Solidworks
• C++
• Mechanical Engineering
• 3d Prototyping
• Wikis
• Ruby on Rails
• Object Oriented Perl
• Python
• Java
• Ruby
• Adobe Photoshop
• Jira
• Engineering
• Heat Transfer
• Cfd
• Managing Database
• Php