Michael Schirger

About Michael Schirger

Driven Staff Software Engineer at Thrivent that has a proven record of delivering customer centric software solutions that directly enabled strategic goals to be met. Continuously learns software development best practices and works to implement best practices on current development team to move the development practice forward. DevOps practitioner that is constantly improving the way my team delivers code in order to meet stakeholder\'s vision for the product.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Thrivent

   Jan 2025 — Present · Appleton, WI, US

   Develop critical architectural solutions across platforms. Examples on the Salesforce platform include implementing a dependency injection framework, a dependency injection-based trigger action framework, and a data publication framework leveraging Salesforce’s Change Data Capture. In Kubernetes web app environments, adopt patterns for secret injection from Vault, secure Node.js applications using Microsoft Entra, and employ GitOps-based tools for continuous deployment of web apps to the OpenShift cluster.• Actively engage in technology trends through internal book clubs, engineering conferences, and digital media from the broader engineering community. Share this knowledge via communities of practice and presentations at engineering conferences.• Foster a collaborative and innovative engineering culture by organizing events like hackathons to address broader engineering challenges and upskill team members from single-stack to multi-stack engineers.• Design and maintain Salesforce CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions. These pipelines handle building and installing Salesforce unlocked packages and unpackaged customizations, significantly reducing deployment times from days to minutes and benefiting all Salesforce teams at Thrivent.• Partner with product leadership to identify and implement critical technologies. Examples include exploring generative AI on the Salesforce platform, introducing feature flag-based deployments for phased rollouts, and standardizing frameworks for non-Salesforce development to enable cross-functional engineering expertise.• Guide junior engineers in adopting SOLID principles, robust unit testing, and loosely coupled customizations for efficient deployment and release separation. Promote a culture of generalist engineering focusing on design patterns and leveraging generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot for syntax efficiency. This mentorship has empowered teams to deliver roadmap deliverables ahead of schedule and at high quality.

Education

• St. Norbert College

  Computer Science and Math, Math and Computer Science

Skills

• Catering
• Programming
• Restaurants
• Customer Service
• Quantitative Reasoning
• Teamwork
• Time Management