
Mike Ree
Verified Expert in Engineering
Distributed Systems Developer
Seattle, WA, United States
Toptal member since October 26, 2018
For over 15 years, Mike has offered search, analytics, real-time distributed big data processing, and custom natural language processing (NLP) solutions for over fifty Fortune 500 companies. His clients have included government agencies, airlines, banks, law firms, pharmaceutical companies, medical insurance agencies, as well as some of the biggest names in technology.
Portfolio
Experience
- Java - 17 years
- MySQL - 17 years
- Elasticsearch - 8 years
- Distributed Systems - 8 years
- Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) - 8 years
- Parallel Computing - 8 years
- Apache Solr - 8 years
- Hadoop - 6 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Subversion (SVN), Go, Java, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Linux, Windows, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
The most amazing...
...thing I've designed and patented was an algorithm for a conceptual search which increased sales by 25% compared to the previous experience.
Work Experience
Enterprise Architect
Allium Health, Inc
- Designed infrastructure to meet Allium Health AI compute requirements along with ensuring HIPAA compliance with all decisions.
- Utilized DevOps best practices and managed infrastructure as code using CloudFormation.
- Locked down all environments and benchmark security against CIS AWS Foundation Benchmarks v1.4.0.
- Performed exploratory data analysis, assisted in indicator creation, assisted in model design, implemented AWS Glue ETL pipeline, and assisted with model creation and Docker packaging for deployment.
CEO
MRS Enterprise Solutions LLC
- Developed a custom NLP-based query parser and suggester to process natural language queries capable of understanding complex requests with dynamic concepts such as “employees who have worked in San Francisco or LA with 5-to-7 years of tenure”.
- Created an extensible content analysis pipeline framework with the ability to gather real-time insights and make live modifications to the analysis stream.
- Built a custom web crawler that is capable of crawling websites, databases, file shares, SharePoint documentation, OpenText, and virtually any other content source with extension; released under PerfectingSearch.com.
- Helped shape a company that is currently leased by two Fortune 500 companies and currently has a reseller agreement with other companies to resell MRS Software.
CTO Direct Report
Delta Dental of Michigan
- Hired to take over the DevOps team as their new lead and oversee the migration of VMWare to Kubernetes on OpenStack on MAAS with acting authority of the CTO.
- Configured Kubernetes as a service on top of OpenStack to ensure easy updates and versioning of our Kubernetes stack.
- Built a B/G deployment process on Kubernetes to allow full functionality tests of deployment before going live with the ability to roll back failures. Saved DDMI multiple times from failed settings to accidental code releases causing system outages.
- Worked with hosting, security, networking, and all software teams to create new practices around new infrastructure.
- Assisted in the design of a new framework for rapid development of DDMI applications.
- Built a large collection of custom dashboards in Kibana to view all of our infrastructure and applications and gain a better understanding of our performance.
- Integrated all data from our SQL Servers, MAAS system, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and application logs, along with custom applications to add inline correlation data to power dashboards.
Director of Enterprise Architecture
SQAD, Inc.
- Inherited an application that took approximately five minutes to compile a page of information and optimized the process so that it could compile over 100,000 pages in less than a minute; it also now support requests of over 100 million pages.
- Developed a custom framework in Elastic (custom plugins), S3, EFS, custom binary files, custom-managed caching layers, and custom binary files to achieve the above results. (Note: The results took about two years with four major releases to achieve).
- Designed all of the initial business requirements, architectural overview, and data strategy to create the first release of SQAD’s new flagship SaaS application.
- Worked directly with the CEO, CTO, CFO, product director, and marketing director to review business ideas and strategy for release to help build a cohesive strategy for the product.
- Focused efforts on processing analytics of over 32 terabytes of current data in real-time with plans to expand to over 150 terabytes.
- Led a team in redesigning the core architecture to reduce network overhead and decrease the time to market—allowing for a more agile process.
- Captured the metrics on the performance of all aspects of our infrastructure to better prioritize the optimization efforts.
Senior Technical Architect
Perficient
- Deployed 40+ Google Search Appliances for multiple Fortune 50 to 500 companies.
- Designed custom analytic engines using Elastic and Solr for multiple enterprise companies.
- Provided week-long training sessions in Solr, Elasticsearch, Nutch, Kafka, and ZooKeeper.
- Traveled alongside Google sales representatives as a technical expert—teaching others how to configure searches for large corporate deployments.
- Designed a custom knowledge base search experience by creating NLP-based questions and answers using Solr, GSA, and MRS Enterprise Solutions NLP solutions.
Senior Search Architect
Quintiles
- Designed a search system to handle multibillion rows of data.
- Created a custom forked version of Solr to handle new complex requirements not capable in Solr, such as performing a relational analysis of data at query time.
- Developed a solution that outperforms all of the existing in-house solutions.
- Led a team of three Solr developers in an effort to create solutions.
- Founded Lucid Works, the company behind Solr, which used my source code to demonstrate the capabilities of extending Solr for time-series data.
Senior Search Expert
OpenSource Connections
- Designed and prototyped Solr solutions that were capable of performing 300 updates per second with 400 queries per second on a quickly evolving data set for Cisco.
- Performed a batch text analysis of patents for the US Patent Trademark Office in the design of a custom engine/syntax parser/full patent highlighter; used Hadoop.
- Assisted in the design of the infrastructure to support a Chinese patent search for the US Patent Trademark Office.
- Worked for Eric Pugh (co-author of Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server).
Solutions Architect
Capital One Financial
- Led the architectural design of new projects and initiatives.
- Designed ShareBuilder.com’s first project utilizing SOA concepts.
- Led the architecture in the efforts to improve the UI performance—decreased the page load times by 50%.
- Worked with the enterprise architecture team to maximize reuse and reduce developer expenses.
- Independently oversaw multiple development teams.
Lead Senior Search Developer
Corbis
- Developed a patent with Corbis as the designer of their “More Like This” search algorithm: “A Proximity-Based Method For Determining Concept Relevance” - COR.P035.
- Led teams of up to five developers in the successful release of multiple products in C# and Java.
- Received my “Apache Solr/Lucene Certified Developer” certification.
- Attended Lucene Revolution 2011 along with Lucene Training and in 2012 along with Hadoop Training.
- Committed a patch to Solr for a span query highlighter.
Architect
Health Global Connect
- Led a startup of seven developers in the release of a social networking site aimed at assisting people with terminal illnesses, a place where they could contact each other and seek moral support.
- Designed a multi-hierarchical taxonomy that organized the content according to its users; it was sourced by scraping multiple medical feeds.
- Successfully deployed multiple releases to production.
Developer
T-Mobile
- Led a contract project for the business analysis team to analyze outage information for the T-Mobile network.
- Recreated existing Crystal reports on demand through an internal portal.
- Created real-time generated graphs and dashboards for use by the BA team to analyze uptime information for all systems in T-Mobile's network.
Consultant
OlyTech Design
- Designed eCommerce websites for multiple local clients from start to finish.
- Developed a large CMS with custom architecture for a business that cared for more than 20 autistic children located in more than six locations.
- Managed and maintained compliance, internal messaging for employees, company notices, timesheets, and documentation repository for the above project.
Creator
OlyGamer
- Ran the largest counter-strike gaming network in existence at the time.
- Hosted multiple gaming servers using the University of Washington's and OGI School of Science and Engineering network to achieve the lowest ping of any server at the time.
- Designed websites, forums, and game statistics sites for users to review the in-game statistics; receiving traffic of over 1 million visitors a month.
- Submitted a patch to an in-game AMX-MOD for counter-strike admin tools.
Experience
A Proximity-based Method for Determining Concept Relevance
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140089324?oq=A+Proximity-Based+Method+For+Determining+Concept+RelevanceUS Patent Trademark Office | BRS Syntax Parser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXiRYfFGHJEThe original developer presented on the work I was contracted to do. When he makes a reference to "we," he is actually referring to the work and solutions that I created.
Attended "Advanced Ultimate Go" at GopherCon 2018
https://www.gophercon.com/Provisioning Online Games: A Traffic Analysis of a Busy Counter-Strike Server
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=compsci_facFrancis Chang was a player on one of my earlier servers and asked to use my network to analyze the performance of network traffic. I worked with Francis to deploy a server in his environment and provided a heavy user base to analyze.
Certifications
AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
AWS
Apache Solr/Lucene Certified Developer
CompTIA
ZCE Zend Certified Engineer in PHP 5
Zend
Microsoft Certified Professional 70-290
Microsoft
Security+
CompTIA
Network+
CompTIA
A+
CompTIA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Apache Lucene, AngularUI, jQuery, Facebook API, Android API, Node.js
Tools
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), IntelliJ IDEA, Apache Solr, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Apache Nutch, Angular CLI, Subversion (SVN), Git, Apache ZooKeeper, Kibana, Apache, Logstash, AWS IAM, Helm, AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker, AWS CloudFormation
Languages
Java, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, C#, Go, Stored Procedure, PHP, Perl, Python
Frameworks
Hadoop, Angular, Spring Boot, Spring, .NET, Zend Framework, Apache Spark, Javalin
Paradigms
Concurrent Programming, Microservices Architecture, Distributed Computing, Parallel Computing, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Microservices, DevOps
Platforms
Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Docker, Linux, Windows, Android, Apache Kafka, Apache Pig, Kubernetes, OpenStack
Storage
NoSQL, AWS Elastic File System, Elasticsearch, Relational Databases, MySQL, Cassandra, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EFS, Apache Hive
Other
Cloud, Distributed Systems, Big Data Architecture, Data Architecture, Architecture, Software Architecture, Leadership, GraphDB, Security, RESTful Microservices, Finite-state Transducers (FST), Google Search Appliance, Nutch, PDF, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Apache Cassandra, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Machine Learning, Amazon Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Enterprise Architecture, Memory Management, IP Networks
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