Michael 🤗 Hoffman Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

I work on the Platform API team within New York Times Games. Crossword, Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, etc. Our team builds and maintain the services and databases behind these massively popular, fast-growing games (>8 billion plays in 2023).Meanwhile we are also evolving our legacy services and data models into a unified, game-generic platform that is accelerating feature and new game development.Unlike other NYT products such as News or Cooking, our workloads are write-heavy and our product databases are large (many terabytes). For this reason, we often tackle novel problems within the greater NYT engineering org.Among other responsibilities, I am a subject matter expert for the service that persists user progress through games and aggregates gameplay statistics for each user.

I worked full-time caring for my children and our household.

New York, Ny, Us

I led two engineering teams, one responsible for Codecademy's content and learning management system and the other responsible for the core interactive learning experience.In addition to technical and process leadership, I was particularly focused on the well-being of my team members during the first months of the pandemic. Over my tenure, I not only retained all of my direct reports, but also supported several through promotions.I also owned the technical interview process for backend engineering candidates. Composed, tested, and launched a new interview module that more closely aligned with the skillset we wanted to hire. Helped to standardize the rubric used to score behavioral interviews given to engineers."Feedback from the team indicates that Michael has built a culture that encourages every voice be heard." –My manager"Michael also knows how to build honest safe environment where all voices are welcome and appreciated. He's thoughtful, caring and supportive, and he's a great representative of our team." –Team member

New York, Ny, Us

I worked as a senior engineer and tech lead on a team focused on evolving Codecademy's CMS and content APIs. I served as a primary owner of several critical codebases and as a subject matter expert in the Ruby language and its ecosystem.Example projects:* Content Search: I designed, implemented, and launched the full-text search system for Codecademy's heterogenous catalog of content: lessons, quizzes, projects, articles, etc. (Elasticsearch, AWS, Ruby, Grape)* Content Permissions: I designed and built and RBAC permissions system allowing different types of CMS users—from admins to contract workers—differential access based on the content type and action type. (Ruby, Rails)* Ruby Static Analysis: I gained consensus on and implemented a system to enforce consistent code style across Codecademy's many Ruby codebases and created a playbook for bringing old code up to standard over time. (Ruby, Rubocop)

New York, Ny, Us

New York, Ny, Us

Evolved Thrive Global's crowd-sourced content CMS and website. Built an SMS-based behavior change application.

New York, Ny, Us

I served on a small team of engineers for the cooking and home website. During my time at Food52 we built a custom content-integrated e-commerce platform from scratch.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Worked my way from the content team onto the tech team. I built Excel macros that generated natural-language descriptions of consumer products from data about them. I migrated that system into the company's Ruby codebase and became a member of the engineering team.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Master’S Degree, Philosophy

Bachelor’S Degree, Philosophy

High School