Michael Helmeste Email & Phone Number

United States

Vancouver, Wa

I joined DiscoverOrg in early 2016. As a high growth company with infrastructure and scalability challenges, I found it an ideal fit and an exciting work environment.My original mission was to enact a wholesale move out of a failing managed service provider environment to Amazon Web Services. Beyond bringing parity between MSP and Cloud environments, the greenfield build-out was an opportunity for me to engineer a truly scalable infrastructure platform from the ground up. Through the use of technologies such as OpsWorks / Chef, Lambda, Kinesis, RDS Aurora, Redshift, and Elastic MapReduce, I was able to quickly create a highly automated modern best-practices platform to support the DiscoverOrg SaaS application suite, manageable by a team of only two individuals. With this as a foundation I developed in-house tools based on AWS Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFormation, and CodeDeploy, which allowed for dynamic self-service test environments and fully automated, repeatable application deployments.In 2017 I shifted roles from an individual contributor to both manager of the Operations Group, as well as Lead Architect across infrastructure and applications. My major contributions were to grow and mentor the operations team, to assist the expanding organization by implementing more formal Operations policy, and to enhance the stability, scalability, and security of the application through definition of and education on architectural best practices.As of 2018, I continue on in a more architecture-centric role as Director of Enterprise Architecture, ensuring that the DiscoverOrg application platform will be able to match the company's astronomical growth and ambition.

Beaverton, Or

Joining Atmosera as part of the merger with Infinity Internet, I continually worked to bring new products and scalability to the operation.During my time as a Senior Network Engineer I designed and implemented the company's first use of MPLS, DWDM, and Juniper MX/EX equipment, and worked to migrate the datacenter network to a fully redundant leaf & spine topology. Additionally, I was in customer facing roles leading network assessments and network re-architectures.In 2014 I developed Atmosera's first formal R&D process and shifted to a focus on new product development for on-premise, datacenter, and hyperscaler hybrid cloud services. I both led and participated in a number of development and productization efforts including high-availability (anycast) network services, a Reduced Cost Bandwidth offering, and the company's Microsoft strategy with Cloud OS and Managed Azure. My focus was on developing new, forward thinking products that could be supportable and scalable through architecture and automation.

Vancouver, Wa

Performed a lead engineering role at a Service Provider based around datacenter and wireless products. Architected new client solutions, solved advanced network issues, and initiated ongoing network improvements.Handled the expansion and engineering of a wireless network consisting of both licensed and unlicensed PtP and PtMP gear in the 5, 11, 16, and 24 GHz bands.Architected the company's first Multi-tenant Cloud offering based on VMware, Arista switching and a ZFS software defined storage platform. Created a ModBus / RS485 software library and toolset for use in controls automation and branch circuit monitor data collection.Undertook a multi-vendor research, evaluation, and testing project for a new datacenter network design. Architected the rollout of Juniper SRX, EX, and Arista products, and promoted JunOS education.

Victoria, Bc

Worked for a SaaS start-up providing energy and emissions management products.Designed and implemented the transition of the production software environment from Rackspace dedicated servers to the Amazon EC2 cloud, with high availability and a horizontally scalable architecture utilizing Amazon RDS, Elastic Load Balancers, and auto-scaling groups.Designed and implemented a transition from consumer level networking gear and ad-hoc desktops to a centralized IT environment with a fully OSPF routed Layer 3 network, SAN storage, LDAP/RADIUS/SAML SSO authentication, off-site backups, monitoring/alerting/paging, and virtualized servers.Architected a peer to peer mesh network for dynamically provisioned VMs to tunnel multicast and management traffic.

Victoria, Bc

Engaged in a limited term grant funded project to investigate and fix network performance issues at the Canadian Astronomy Data Center, as well as to build a Cloud Computing platform for Astronomers.Investigated and resolved multiple related performance and connectivity issues from the CADC to other research and educational institutions. Utilized a knowledge of TCP congestion control algorithms to investigate issues pertaining to high latency high throughput network ("Long Fat Network"​) paths. Wrote a software library to decode raw exports of BGP routing table data, and implemented automated gathering and analysis of the Internet routing table.Created network performance testing tools to allow end users to run multi-stream TCP tests with automated packet capture and analysis. Designed and successfully implemented a complete network re-architecture, to bring the CADC from a flat and NAT'd Layer 2 switched network to a Layer 3 routed network utilizing Cisco 6500 switches and public BGP routing. The reorganization resulted in a 2+ fold performance increase, as well as greater manageability and scalability.Created a WAN optimization proxy to split a single TCP stream, to overcome congestion control algorithm related issues and accelerate bulk data delivery over high BDP links.Architected a dynamic peer to peer VPN networking model to allow the transport of private Cloud platform address space over disparate datacenter networks, and participated in the development of a Cloud Computing platform for astronomers using grid scheduling software on top of libvirt and KVM.

Santa Barbara, Ca

Worked as a network engineer and programmer on a small five person team managing the campus backbone network and centralized network services.Provisioned L2 VLAN switched and L3 OSPF routed wired and wireless networks using Cisco, HP, and Foundry gear over copper and fiber. Developed software packages for BGP based null route distribution, sorting bulk packet capture data, and keeping track of compromised user accounts. Maintained the FTP mirror and served as backup operator.Performed wireless site surveys, wireless installations, and both wireless and wired IP performance testing. Implemented an 802.1x wireless security solution. Configured Exim based e-mail servers with spam filtering using popular open source packages. Configured and installed FreeBSD and Linux servers in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.Additionally wrote a web services based centralized authentication and authorization service using J2EE, OpenLDAP, and PostgreSQL.

Irvine, Ca

Worked on a project involving MEMS sensors and RFID for the Li-Bachman MEMS group at the University of California, Irvine. Assembled an RFID system, reverse engineered a Texas Instruments reader module, and developed a system for integrating MEMS sensors onto RFID tags.Additionally implemented an Asterisk VoIP PBX and PSTN gateway in support of the research group.

Hong Kong

Designed a Nintendo GBA based patient data collection device for the Psychiatry department of the University of Hong Kong. Used Xilinx FPGAs, Intel flash memory, and the Cypress EZ-USB chipset in a cross-compiling GCC / Xilinx WebPACK development environment.