Michael Highstead
Principal Systems Engineer at Noibu
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
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RockstarMichael Highstead is a Principal Systems Engineer with a decade of experience building and operating large-scale, real-time data platforms from Ottawa. He architected a cloud-native, Go-based analytics pipeline at Noibu that scales to over 5 billion daily events with 99.99% availability and cut video P99 load times from 30+ seconds to sub-second. Previously at Shopify he owned high-risk MySQL and Kubernetes production tooling and built realtime data services that delivered sub-second aggregates from diverse stores like Kafka, Bigtable and Druid. He combines systems-level reliability work (oncall, failover tooling) with hands-on service design, observability, and multi-tenant database abstractions that drove new revenue features. Colleagues rely on him to standardize distributed workflows—he introduced Temporal-based patterns to improve failure recovery and operational consistency across teams.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
2,391reputation
336kreached
50answers
20questions
json
top-5%
cassandra
top-5%
Github Skills (55)
nosql10
cassandra10
driver10
gocql10
golang10
database10
programming-language9
json9
semantics9
kafka9
producer9
go9
pooling9
apache-kafka8
datastax-enterprise8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Highstead/Tools
Sep 2015 - Oct 2023
Contributions:2 PRs, 33 pushes, 4 branches in 8 years 2 months
Highstead/go-mysql
Jan 2019 - Jan 2023
a powerful mysql toolset with Go
Contributions:3 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years
golangtoolsetmysql
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