Michael Candido, Developer in Seattle, WA, United States
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Michael Candido

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Blockchain Developer

Seattle, WA, United States

Toptal member since July 9, 2024

Expertise
NFTJavaScriptC#TypeScriptVue.jsSolidityAWSMySQLNestJSPostgreSQLNext.jsMongoDBReact.js
Bio

Michael is a former principal engineer at Microsoft Azure and lead engineer at Crossmint, a top-tier blockchain startup. He has proven world-class expertise in Web3, cloud computing, and distributed systems and extensive experience building and scaling services from the ground up that serve 100+ million requests per day. Michael is comfortable taking on the toughest technical challenges and building scalable Web3 apps, back ends, APIs, and web applications on par with top-tier tech companies.

Portfolio

Crossmint
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Solidity, Ethers.js, Solana, Web3...
Microsoft
C#, Azure, Cloud Computing

Experience

  • TypeScript - 7 years
  • Node.js - 7 years
  • Web3 - 5 years
  • Solidity - 5 years
  • Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) - 5 years
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
  • Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) - 4 years
  • Solana - 3 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Solidity, React, JavaScript, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Web3, Solana, C#

The most amazing...

...systems I've built are the globally scalable back end for Azure Functions and the distributed EVM transaction service that powers Crossmint.

Work Experience

Lead Engineer

2022 - 2024
Crossmint
  • Headed an engineering team of five people for Crossmint's flagship non-fungible token (NFT) checkout product.
  • Built Crossmint's minting infrastructure, a horizontally scalable transaction service, to handle all Crossmint Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain, resulting in 10 times throughput and 95% fewer on-call incidents.
  • Collaborated with top marketplaces and launchpads, including Magic Eden, Manifold, and Tensor, to integrate Crossmint's product across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana, BSC, Cardano, and Sui.
  • Migrated Crossmint's back end from Vercel to Azure, cutting site load times by 75%, ending cold starts, and reducing compute costs tenfold.
  • Established a private localnet infrastructure for development environments, quintupling test run speed in CI and eliminating recurrent monthly CI disruptions.
Technologies: Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Solidity, Ethers.js, Solana, Web3, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, JavaScript, TypeScript, MongoDB, MySQL, Next.js, NestJS, Cloud Computing, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT)

Principal Software Engineering Manager

2013 - 2019
Microsoft
  • Built and launched an enterprise business platform, App Service Environment, and swiftly iterated and grew the customer base, making it a major growth and revenue driver for Azure App Service.
  • Managed spot scheduling, minimizing the cost of serverless executions without a loss of availability by distributing functions over spot compute in multi-cluster arrangements.
  • Shipped a regional disaster recovery system for Azure App Service, replicating data cross-region for over one million apps. We used it later that year to recover data in production during a prominent Washington, DC, outage.
Technologies: C#, Azure, Cloud Computing

Experience

Crossmint NFT Minting API

https://www.crossmint.com/products/nft-minting-api
A fully managed platform for minting, managing, and distributing NFT collections. I built the transaction management back end for this product, a horizontally distributed service that processes thousands of NFT operations per day in a scalable and fault-tolerant way.

Azure Functions

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/functions/
Serverless computing for Azure. Like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions allows for creating event-based programming flows to connect other Azure services while avoiding dedicated servers' computing and maintenance costs. I built the core back end for this product, which is responsible for scaling millions of function executions worldwide.

Azure App Service Environment

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/environment/overview
Enterprise hosting for web applications with dedicated infrastructure and advanced networking and security features. I launched this product and continued its development, adding features like private networking, autoscale, and Linux virtual machines.

Education

2009 - 2013

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - Champaign, IL, USA

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Vue, React, Node.js

Languages

TypeScript, C#, Solidity, JavaScript, Python

Frameworks

Next.js, NestJS

Platforms

Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux

Storage

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB

Other

Ethers.js, Cloud Computing, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Web3, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), Solana, Polygon

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