Michael Heap
Senior Director, Product Management (Runtimes) at Kong Inc.
Chichester, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Heap is a product-minded engineering leader with 14 years of commercial experience, currently Senior Director of Product Management (Runtimes) at Kong, where he has progressed through developer experience and Kubernetes-focused roles. He blends hands-on backend and DevOps expertise—contributing to notable open-source projects like Vonage SDKs and nektos/act—with product leadership that shapes developer-facing platforms and tooling. A confident, adaptable self-starter, Michael has improved SDK robustness, documentation tooling (including PDF generation for Kong docs), and local CI tooling usability, demonstrating an eye for developer ergonomics and reliability. He’s an experienced conference speaker since 2009 with 70+ talks, a GitHub Stars open-source contributor, and serves on the OpenAPI business governance board, bringing both community credibility and strategic perspective. Based in Chichester, he’s known for stepping in wherever “an extra pair of hands” is needed and for turning complex API and runtime challenges into practical, user-friendly solutions.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computing Computing, BSc Computing Computing at University of LeedsBSc Computing Computing, BSc Computing Computing at Leeds Beckett University
Stackoverflow
431reputation
13kreached
19answers
0questions
Github Skills (40)
api-rest10
puppeteer10
docker10
javascript10
github-ci10
messaging10
apidoc10
api-design10
restful-api10
css10
cil10
sms10
dockers10
phpunit10
http-client10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
Vonage/vonage-php-sdk-core
Jul 2017 - Aug 2020
Vonage REST API client for PHP. API support for SMS, Voice, Text-to-Speech, Numbers, Verify (2FA) and more.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 releases, 79 commits, 95 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the core functionality of the Vonage PHP SDK core by implementing enhancements to handle HTTP errors, refactoring client tests for improved readability and maintainability, and renaming components for alignment with customer-facing terminology. They also added the ability to list account numbers, implemented methods for GET/POST/PUT/DELETE requests, and provided support for the conversion endpoint. These changes indicate a focus on improving the API client's robustness, usability, and feature set.
sms-messagesdeveloper-destinationnexmovoice-to-textserver-sdk
Vonage/vonage-node-sdk
Nov 2017 - Aug 2020
Vonage API client for Node.js. API support for SMS, Voice, Text-to-Speech, Numbers, Verify (2FA) and more.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 51 commits, 40 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Vonage Node.js SDK. Their work focused on enhancing the HTTP client, adding the ability to configure the HTTP port. They also introduced new features like SMS search and account top-up via autoreload, along with adding support for the conversion and redact APIs. Additionally, the user fixed test failures and made the source and test directories Prettier compliant.
developer-destinationnexmovoice-to-textserver-sdktwo-factor-authentication
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.