Michael Continues

Principal Engineer
linkedin.com/in/mikestopcontinues
Dynamic tech lead with 17 years’ experience. Long track record of company-wide impact and collaboration. Deep expertise in product engineering, yet at home with AI, data, and systems. Passionate mentor, in pursuit of excellence.

Skills

Leadership
Product development, developer experience, system architecture, AI engineering, cross-org comms, team building, strategic leadership
Languages
JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Python, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS
Frontend
React (NextJS, Remix), Svelte, SolidJS, Vite, Astro, Tailwind, GraphQL
Backend
AWS (CDK), Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, Docker, Kubernetes, Serverless, Postgres, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch
AI
PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas, NumPy, Langchain, Qdrant, Jupyter

Work

Senior Staff Lead of AI Projects, Integrations, Dev Experience

MongoDB

Jul 2022 - Nov 2023
  • Built and mentored three teams (AI Projects, Developer Experience, and Integrations), leading 14 engineers as a manager and technical lead.
  • Led company-wide generative AI engineering efforts. Provided technical leadership across two dozens projects, defined architecture, and drove adoption of new tech.
  • Supported growth of Internal Engineering org by creating hiring protocols, introducing async-first remote practices, and organizing cross-team collaborations.
  • Architected company AI gateway, embedding pipeline, chatbot playground, and project starters, saving weeks on new GenAI projects, managing security, data scrubbing, and upstream error handling.
  • Pioneered multi-user, multi-modal GPT-4 Slackbot with context awareness and user-scoped data access, resulting in 1k+ interactions/day, saving 6 hours/week per surveyed employee.
  • Improved company-wide developer efficiency with an deployment dashboard centralizing secrets, cron jobs, logs, errors, and scale management, as well as with templates, starter repos, and seminars in CI/CD best-practices.
  • Cut feedback time on internal tools and processes from months to minutes with “suggestion box” integrated directly with web apps, company chat, email, and task tracker.
  • Pioneered modern integrations architecture, key dataset API gateway, and reusable SDKs, cutting new integration timelines in half, reducing downtime, and saving on external platform dependences.
  • Streamlined security, compliance, and audit workflows across project improving agility across projects.

Founder

SiteArcade

Jan 2020 - Jun 2022
  • Reduce website creation time from weeks to minutes with smart sync engine, AI-powered design, and forward-looking UX, ensuring websites stayed up-to-date automatically with new products, promotions, and events.
  • Deployed event-based serverless architecture, trained neutral nets, and implemented best-practices for CI/CD, monitoring, testing, and analytics.
  • Led product design, beta program, and direct outreach. Managed freelancers. Propelled our blog into the industry top 10. Presented at major conferences.

Principal Software Engineer

GLG Insights

Aug 2018 - Dec 2019
  • Pioneered company-wide ML initiative and drove adoption across the tech org with convenient GUIs/APIs for managing A/B tests, multi-armed bandits, and collaborative filtering.
  • Reduced churn by 50%, increased paid event attendance by 20%, increased CRM profile completeness by 30%, and optimized click-through across our website.
  • Unlocked radical new business opportunities by re-engineering our compliance engine from over a minute/request to under a second, then by architecting realtime sync between our database, Salesforce, and our communication apps.
  • Led both engineering and product channels, facilitating the development of my team and the org through mentorship, targeted projects, and a coding book club.

Founder

AlephPost

Feb 2017 - Jul 2018
  • Launched innovative news portal to reduce misinformation and bias by providing high-level insight into trending topics, leveraging clustering techniques, NLP, and realtime analysis.
  • Upgraded users’ social media feeds with a browser extension that injected contextual data alongside shared links.

Principal Software Engineer

The Huffington Post / AOL

Sep 2014 - Jan 2017
  • Managed full product lifecycle for a dozen apps, from the pitch through design, development, and adoption, serving as the point-of-contact with stakeholders, users, and teams across the org.
  • Led multiple teams simultaneously, growing devs’ tech prowess and soft-skills by providing them with ample opportunities to explore interests in alignment with company goals.
  • Pioneered data-driven decision-making across the company, empowering staff with smart suggestions, interactive data, testing tools, a custom report builder, as well as leading workshops on how to optimize our content pipeline.
  • 10x’d curated ad views, doubled time-on-site for tentpole content, saved 60 hours/month of data analyst time, and optimized social ad spend with a suite of tools serving our sales and promotion teams.
  • Led the re-architecture of our data pipeline from client to cold-storage, ending data outages and erroneous data. Helped AOL adopt our work across all their brand sites.

Senior Software Engineer

New York University

Aug 2013 - Aug 2014
  • Accelerated research by creating an open-source platform for data sharing, management, and archival in compliance with NIH and NHS guidelines, serving hundreds of scientists world-wide.
  • Created in-browser multi-track video editor and data tagging tool with emerging video, audio, and canvas DOM APIs.
  • Led product development and user research. Streamlined onboarding flow, tripling user activation and data uploads.

Software Engineer

Freelance Development

Jan 2007 - Jul 2013
  • Served dozens of clients with performant websites, greenfield internal apps, and custom plugins for CMS platforms.

Current Projects

Founder

BrowserCat

Dec 2023 - Current
  • Launched “serverless” headless browser platform, drastically cutting dev costs across wide-ranging applications, including bespoke browser automation, LLM web-surfing, scraping, testing, dynamic image generation, and more.
  • Deployed edge-based architecture, featuring global scale, <50ms cold starts, and persistent websocket connections, ensuring industry-leading performance and flexibility.