Michael Smith

Key Biscayne, Florida, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Michael Smith is a seasoned software engineer with 12 years of experience building resilient, observable systems at scale, primarily at Netflix where he drove operability and edge proxy development. He has deep backend expertise—contributing to high-profile open-source Netflix projects like Zuul and Ribbon—focused on performance, extensibility, and request/response handling improvements. His work spans platform engineering, productivity tooling, and cross-functional initiatives, with a track record of refactoring legacy code to reduce duplication and enable safer extensibility. Based in Key Biscayne, Florida, he combines production-facing reliability engineering with pragmatic architecture skills honed from leading platform and PAAS efforts. Unusually for a software engineer, his background began in mechanical engineering and early hands-on industrial training, which informs a methodical, systems-thinking approach to problem solving. He thrives on making large distributed systems observable and resilient while keeping developer productivity and extensibility front of mind.

12 years of coding experience

24 years of employment as a software developer

Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Physics, Chemistry at South Park Sixth Form College

BEng, Mechanical Engineering, BEng, Mechanical Engineering at Queen Mary, U. of London

Github Skills (12)

ribbon10

javas10

http10

load-balancing10

performance-optimization10

java10

concurrency10

apidoc9

netflix-eureka9

api9

dependency-management9

network-programming8

Programming languages (1)

Java

Github contributions (5)

Netflix/zuul

Nov 2013 - Aug 2019

Zuul is a gateway service that provides dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, security, and more.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:372 commits, 27 PRs, 259 pushes in 5 years 9 months

Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Netflix Zuul gateway service by refactoring and adding enhancements to the code base. They made several attributes public to facilitate code refactoring and remove duplication. Their work involved modifying existing classes such as `HTTPRequestUtils`, `ZuulEvent` and `FilterFileManager`. The user also added improvements to the handling of request bodies.

dynamic-routingmonitoringsecurity

Netflix/ribbon

Mar 2018 - Apr 2018

Ribbon is a Inter Process Communication (remote procedure calls) library with built in software load balancers. The primary usage model involves REST calls with various serialization scheme support.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 1 month

Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on optimizing the Ribbon library's performance and functionality. They made changes to improve load balancing algorithms, such as using `ThreadLocalRandom` for random server selection and allowing customization of the `LoadBalancerStats` implementation. Furthermore, the user refactored code to enable extensibility through overriding server instance creation and adjusting server stats for performance gains. The user also upgraded dependencies to improve functionality.

interprocess-communicationload-balancerrestserialization

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