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Michael Zavarella

staff engineer · platform & infrastructure · briarcliff manor, ny

Staff engineer with 10+ years building the CI/CD and infrastructure platforms engineering organizations scale on — distributed build systems, Kubernetes-based delivery pipelines, multi-cloud architecture, and the developer tooling that compresses onboarding from days to hours.

I treat CI/CD as a discipline: establishing standards, enabling adjacent teams, and turning the platform into a force multiplier. Along the way I've cut cloud spend 30%, lifted uptime from 99.5% to 99.99% for a 50+ engineer org, and built GraphQL platform layers, API gateways, and async processing infrastructure that improve velocity across the stack.

Experience

  1. Staff Engineer — Smarter Technologies
    Remote · Dec 2025 – Present

    Designed an async, multi-modal workflow platform on Temporal replacing a synchronous EDI-only system — unifying 300ms API calls to multi-hour automation under one orchestration model, powering an AI voice-calling agent.

  2. Staff Engineer, Backend Lead — McGraw Hill
    Remote · Aug 2025 – Dec 2025

    Led the Sharpen platform backend from EC2 autoscaling groups to a centralized Kubernetes pipeline, and built developer tooling that compressed onboarding from days to hours.

  3. Senior Engineer, SRE & Observability — Capital One
    New York, NY (Hybrid) · Oct 2024 – Aug 2025

    Led platform engineering for next-generation observability at enterprise scale and architected a GraphQL platform layer. Contributed to Capital One's inaugural LLM tooling group, driving AI-assisted development adoption.

  4. Platform Engineering Manager & Staff Engineer — Yummly
    San Carlos, CA (Remote) · Aug 2021 – Mar 2024

    Owned CI/CD, AWS architecture, and internal tooling for a 50+ engineer org. Cut cloud costs 30% and lifted uptime from 99.5% to 99.99%, and ran a strangler-fig microservices migration on Kubernetes.

  5. Lead Infrastructure Engineer — DV Trading
    New York, NY (Hybrid) · May 2019 – Aug 2021

    Designed and operated an HA CI/CD system on Jenkins + Docker Swarm across NYC, Chicago, and London, and built a low-latency tick-data store powering quantitative strategy backtesting.

  6. Software / Lead Developer — Capital One · Bioclinica · Independence Blue Cross
    NY · PA · Nov 2015 – May 2019

    GraphQL APIs and document indexing in Clojure/Python/ElasticSearch, drug-trial research integrations, a YAML-based XML-to-JSON transformation DSL, and marketing analytics platforms.

Tools & Tech

KubernetesAWSTemporalGoTypeScriptPythonClojureGraphQLTerraformCI/CDKafkaPostgresObservabilityDistributed Systems

Built

  • Clojure.org Documentation

    Authored official guides on higher-order functions and destructuring, and contributed bug fixes to the Clojure core libraries.

    Higher Order Functions → Destructuring →

  • GraphQL.org Documentation

    Contributed documentation covering Clojure library representation.

    GraphQL.org →

  • Dash Notes

    A quick note-taking app for capturing ideas on the fly.

    GitHub →

Elsewhere

github · linkedin · contact@zavarella.me