Michael Lese Email & Phone Number

Swiss army knife (my old manager's words) of a backend engineer who's built and scaled multiple distributed systems and petabyte-scale data platforms supporting 30+ million daily active users. Fresh off a 3,788½ mile solo bicycle tour from Brooklyn to SF (DM for pics). A testament to my (terminally offline) project management skills…though Perplexity helped me prune my decision tree while planning the tour. Looking for something equally stimulating in tech (tough act to follow). A history and CS major, I joined Grammarly because of how effectively the product tore apart my history thesis during a product demo. I spent 7½ years there, growing from a new grad to a subject matter expert, turning open-ended specs into robust, scalable infrastructure. Largely worked in Scala, Python, and Java. Used Apache Spark and did a lot of CI and DevOps work with AWS while building petabyte-scale data platforms. Itching to add some new things to this list at my next role.Led critical projects including full-stack migrations, developer toolkit creation, and query optimization that resulted in significant annual cost savings. I like a low-effort, high-reward easy win. Relentless, persistent iterative builder who loves improving code quality, documentation, and system reliability. I.e., spinning up MVPs out of nothing, and bringing MVPs to maturity. To quote an old version of my resume: "Think of the new hires!" I've been told I seem “everywhere” — herding cats, onboarding devs, talking to stakeholders, and troubleshooting in support channels. As a prolific technical interviewer, senior hires have cited my interviews as significant in their decision to join Grammarly.

Listed skills include Java, Python, Javascript, C, and 14 others.

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  Colgate University

  Computer Science