Michael S.

About Michael S.

I\'m a Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years building distributed systems and backend platforms at scale, primarily at Amazon and AWS. I\'ve architected services processing millions of daily transactions, led platform migrations with zero downtime, and driven technical decisions across organizations of 30 to 50+ engineers.At AWS, I led developer experience and technical content strategy for Amazon DynamoDB, bridging engineering, product, and the broader developer community. I spoke at re:Invent 2024 (DAT414) and published on the AWS Databases Blog on change data capture and DynamoDB design patterns. I also served as a Technical Bar Raiser, conducting 200+ interviews and calibrating the engineering bar across Amazon and AWS.Beyond the IC work, I care about building teams that are psychologically safe, technically rigorous, and fast. I\'ve mentored engineers at every level, led cross-team retrospectives, and built onboarding infrastructure that cut ramp-up time by 40%.My stack centers on Python, AWS (DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, SNS/SQS), distributed systems architecture, and infrastructure as code. I\'m energized by 0-to-1 problems, platform work that multiplies team velocity, and the intersection of ML and backend systems.Open to conversations about Staff+ engineering roles in platform, backend infrastructure, or developer tooling. Feel free to reach out.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer Tech Lead

   Morgan & Morgan, P.A.

   Jul 2025 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Building backend systems and AI-augmented workflows at a nationwide civil litigation firm. Leading document search pipeline reliability and a search index re-architecture across a microservices platform (80+ Python services, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Redshift)- Search pipeline ownership (Quaero): Took over a production document search indexing pipeline. Root-caused 144K failed documents across 5 distinct bugs (non-atomic writes, exception masking, race conditions, stuck job detection), shipped fixes bringing coverage from ~93% to 99%+. Led an 877K-document backfill and ECS migration for the chunking service- Document v3 re-architecture: Led schema redesign for court docket sync (single-matter to nested many-to-many), coordinating 3 engineers across time zones against a hard deadline. Produced architectural deep dives on the metadata updater (1:N message processing, Painless scripts, propagation fan-out), decomposed into 18 tickets across 7 milestones- Folio OCR pipeline: Architectural review and estimation for a new event-driven OCR pipeline (EventBridge, SQS, ECS Fargate, Textract, ElastiCache). Identified 8 structural issues in the original ticket breakdown and proposed a corrected dependency graph.Quick wins- Automated address parsing with zip/year matching to contaminated water sites for 2,250 clients (up to 89% precision)- Designed and launched the firm\'s first automated screening assessment for SWE candidates- Drove org-wide AI tooling adoption from scratch: custom Claude Code skills, AI learning curriculum, and usage standards for the engineering org- Reduced repo build times 50% via remote caching- Streamlined CI/CD with named version tags and version-controlled deployments

Education

• Woburn Collegiate Institute

  High School, Diploma

  2005 — 2009

• University of Waterloo

  Bachelor of Computer Science, Honours Computer Science, Co-operative Program, History Minor

  2009 — 2014

Skills

• Debugging
• Css
• Software Documentation
• Sql
• Spatial Analysis
• Technical Writing
• Html
• Php
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Continuous Integration
• Java
• Software Development
• Python
• Algorithm Design
• Testing
• Jquery
• Creative Problem Solving
• Git
• Software Project Management
• Product Management
• Mysql
• Technical Documentation
• Product Development
• Perl
• Business Strategy
• Troubleshooting
• Django
• Strategic Planning
• Javascript
• Html 5
• Team Leadership
• C++
• Quality Assurance
• Entrepreneurship