Michael Puncel
Engineering Manager, Traffic Engineering at Square
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Puncel is a seasoned software engineer with 13 years specializing in deployment systems, traffic engineering, and Go, currently driving infrastructure work at Block after leading Traffic Engineering at Square. He designed and helped ship Square’s Envoy-based service mesh, custom xDS control plane, and tooling to support multi-environment traffic shifting and deploy systems. Deeply familiar with edge and proxy internals, he has contributed to the high-profile envoyproxy/envoy project—adding hedging, refining retry/state APIs, and hardening upstream request handling. His background spans operating Kubernetes-centered deploy pipelines, distributed rate limiting, and service discovery, blending hands-on coding with systems-level ownership. An MIT-trained engineer, he pairs electrical/mixed-signals early experience with a pragmatic approach to resilient distributed systems. Colleagues rely on him for tackling subtle reliability challenges that surface only at scale.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering (M.Eng.), Computer Science, Master of Engineering (M.Eng.), Computer Science at MITBS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (15)
http10
proxy10
c-language10
proxy-server10
cprogramming-language10
proxies10
networking10
api-design9
performance-optimization9
test-automation8
configuration-management8
dockers7
kubernetes-pods7
docker7
kubernetes7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
envoyproxy/envoy
Feb 2018 - Aug 2021
Cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:54 reviews, 22 commits, 31 PRs in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Envoy proxy's core functionality and internal workings, focusing on areas such as retry mechanisms, request handling, and timeout configurations. Their work included refactoring the retry state API, implementing hedging features to manage multiple upstream requests, and addressing issues related to upstream request handling and connection resets. Furthermore, they added features like request hedging configuration and incorporated improvements for various timeout scenarios, while also addressing a crash related to request hedging handling.
nanoservicesmore-catsgolangcontainersproxy
mpuncel/envoy
Feb 2018 - Aug 2022
C++ front/service proxy
Contributions:2 PRs, 284 pushes, 51 branches in 4 years 6 months
cppservice-proxyproxy
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