Michael Black Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Us

Us

Developing backend applications for the recommendations system.

New York, New York, Us

Helping lead a team of software engineers to develop backend systems for Archer, a dating app.

New York, New York, Us

Building backend APIs to support various social media and dating app features using technologies like Go, Kafka, MySQL, and many more.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Supply Chain Business Data Platform team:- Architected a platform of high-level design patterns and libraries for various types of products with similar technical necessities, enabling the team to quickly develop new applications.- Mentored engineers and interns on the team on topics such as Kotlin best practices, RESTful API development best practices, functional programming, reactive programming, CI/CD, test-driven development, and software architecture.- Developed new products and features for business partners using technologies like Kotlin, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Docker and Gradle.- Identified a need on the team for a free online tool to facilitate agile retrospective meetings and developed that tool using JavaScript, React, Material UI, WebSockets, NodeJS, and PostgreSQL.- Improved stability and workflows for legacy systems inherited by the team.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Item Location Services team:- Worked with the team to formulate a strategy for introducing stability and high scalability to a critical, problematic read-only API using Kafka and RocksDB.- Created a new pattern for proxying and replicating incoming requests to both new and old systems to provide near real-time evaluations of data consistency.- Mentored engineers on the team on topics such as Kotlin best practices, functional programming, reactive programming, CI/CD, test-driven development, and software architecture.- Identified a need from my team and others for getting Slack notifications when an individual’s on-call schedule starts, then designed and implemented a common solution to solve this issue (now this tool is actively used by 25+ teams).- Performance tuned the core data aggregator application responsible for ingesting thousands of Kafka records and layering them against historical layered records stored in PostgreSQL resulting in over a 6x performance increase.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Enterprise Checkout team:- Improved operational excellence and application stability for the two Enterprise Checkout APIs that required support across hundreds of cloud environments (1800+).- Evaluated new technologies such as PostgreSQL and CockroachDB to replace the existing Redis persistence layer for one of the core PoS APIs. Later developed this new persistence layer.- Redesigned I/O dependency logic to improve application resiliency and data consistency.- Identified gaps with team testing practices and developed a new tool (mockingbird) to improve functional and integration testing with multiple HTTP dependencies. Utilized Golang and Docker to easily spin up HTTP APIs with mock data that could be horizontally scaled locally or in cloud environments.- Partnered with other teams to understand and adopt better functional testing practices through the use of this new tool.- Supported early engineering talent programs by repeatedly recruiting and mentoring Technology Leadership Program engineers (TLPs) and Intern.- Designed and developed an internal website that enabled partner teams to interact with our APIs without engineering assistance. Front end was developed using JavaScript, React, Material UI, Nginx, and Praxis (an internal React library/bootstrap). Back end was developed using Kotlin, Ratpack, Gradle, Docker, and Elasticsearch. Each application was designed with best common practices in mind to reduce ramp-up time for new engineers on the project.- Developed a toolkit feature that leveraged the ELK stack to ingest audit data from a Kafka topic via Logstash, index that data in Elasticsearch, and display that data in Kibana. To reduce the need for knowledge of Kibana, the toolkit took input data from the UI to generate a Kibana URL for the user to navigate to.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Enterprise Checkout team.- Developed RESTful APIs for the overall Enterprise Checkout system using Kotlin, Ratpack, Gradle, Docker, Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis.- Partnered with the Mobile Checkout engineering team to design, develop, iterate on, and deploy new point of sale capabilities to stores.- Worked on a special project outside of my team/company to help quickly design and develop systems for a new fulfillment method on [Target.com](http://target.com/).- Partnered with product owners and other engineering teams to develop key Point of Sale features such as various types of promotional, coupon, and gift card support.- Sought out and addressed technical debt across multiple projects to attempt to maintain high code quality.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Software Engineer in the Technology Leadership Program (TLP):- TLP is a rotational program aimed at providing valuable technology experience for software engineers who are new to the industry and grooming talent for technological leadership within the company. Each rotation is roughly 6 months.- First rotation was on the Enterprise Services/APIs team where I worked on a small team of engineers to design/implement a NodeJS application that generated Grafana dashboards for RESTful APIs based upon Swagger specs and deployment information. Additionally worked on the backend of a greenfield internal alerting application using Golang, Kubernetes, and Drone.- Second rotation was on the Digital Checkout team, where I mainly worked with my team on designing and engineering a new system called Enterprise Checkout that supports Point of Sale in both digital and physical channels. This involved using technologies such as Kotlin, Ratpack, Groovy, Docker, Cassandra, Kubernetes, Drone, Redis, and Kafka.

Birmingham, Al, Us

- Designed a strategy for adapting a new modern architecture on top of the legacy systems with a small team of experienced engineers and engineering leadership.- Developed microservices with Golang on AWS using technologies like PostgreSQL, Docker, Redis, SNS, and SQS.

Minneapolis And St. Paul, Minnesota, Us

- Teaching Assistant for the "Intro to Data Structures & Algorithms" computer science course- Helped students learn the fundamentals of data structures and the algorithms for utilizing them- Facilitated several 2 hour labs with other Teaching Assistants for ~30 students

Minneapolis And St. Paul, Minnesota, Us

- Teaching Assistant for the "Intro to C/C++" computer science course for engineers- Helped engineering students learn how to code, most of them for the first time- Facilitated 3 hour labs with other TAs for ~30 students

Eden Prairie, Mn, Us

As an intern for the Application Protection Manager (APM) Development Team, I participated in several weekly meetings with my team and interns while developing a web application for my team to use.Project Bluemoon:My web application I developed throughout the summer was a front end user interface for a PowerShell test suite that provided simplicity and additional functionality for the test suite. Using Bootstrap CSS and AngularJS I designed and implemented a user interface that supported test submission forms and a searchable log of completed tests. On the back end, one of my coworkers had already been developing the PowerShell test suite so I chose C# as my language to stay within the .NET framework for simplicity. Knowing that my coworker would take over my project upon my internship ending, I did my best to use common software development patterns to make the logic flow intuitive. It was great experience working so closely with a full time developer because we would often discuss technical specs/support for our respective applications and compromise to achieve overall improved functionality.

Eden Prairie, Mn, Us

As an intern on the Enterprise Manager (EM) Test Engineering Team I participated in several weekly meetings with my team where I would give updates on my application development and gather feedback from coworkers who would be the main consumers of the product.Project AVICE:Over the course of the summer I developed a web application that served the purpose of managing and displaying up-to-date equipment information in lieu of a static webpage that needed to be manually updated. Using Play Framework, I designed an MVC application using mainly Scala on the back end and jQuery, Bootstrap CSS, and Play's Scala HTML template engine on the front end. This was a difficult task for me since almost everything was new information, but I learned quickly. I became experienced with using frameworks, threading, using APIs, and Single Page Application (SPA) web development.

Bachelor’S Degree, Computer Science

Bachelor Of Engineering (B.E.), Computer Engineering

High School Diploma