Mike Vincent

Mike Vincent

Los Angeles, CA | U.S. Citizen | mikevincent.dev

Education

University of Texas at Tyler

Master of Science, Industrial Engineering, 2015

The Pennsylvania State University

Bachelor of Science, Linguistics, 2011

Experience

Lead Software Engineer, Search and Platform Infrastructure | PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

2024 to Present | Los Angeles, CA

Founding engineer building AI search and payments infrastructure for Capital One and Discover.

• Discover.com Search — hybrid search over vector embeddings and BM25, scored on offline evaluation sets that measure answer quality.
• CapitalOne.com Search — hybrid search with autocomplete and indexing, surfacing results as a customer types.
• Capital One Eno — NLU, entity, and intent models behind the account chatbot, moved from Kubeflow onto Capital One's enterprise AI platform.
• Capital One DataBolt — vaultless payment tokenization in Go and TypeScript; a payment clears without exposing the real card number.
• Zelle — onboarding, authentication, and access-control APIs to move money between people in seconds, safely.

Software Engineering Manager, Infrastructure | Cubic Transportation Systems

2021 to 2024 | San Diego, CA

Software engineering manager for transit-payment SaaS across five agencies — WMATA, NYC MTA, BART, LA Metro, and MBTA.

• NYC MTA OMNY — contactless iPhone fare payments with Apple; Kubernetes manifests and Docker containers for the payments app.
• LA Metro TAP — fare-payment backend as Docker and Kubernetes microservices with vertical, horizontal, and KEDA autoscaling on AWS and Azure.
• Platform security — mTLS with Istio and a Smallstep private certificate authority; CrowdStrike, Nessus, and Trend Micro across the fleet.
• Release engineering — Terraform, AWS, and GitHub Actions CI/CD, under PCI and SOC 1/2 compliance; production code in Python, Java, and JavaScript across AWS, Azure, and vSphere.
• Ran a team of 18 across the US, India, and Germany supporting transit SaaS for millions of riders; on-call on PagerDuty, monitoring on Prometheus and Grafana.

Lead Senior Software Engineer | Cubic Transportation Systems

2019 to 2021 | San Diego, CA

Lead engineer building rider-facing chatbots, prediction, and the cloud platform behind transit fare services.

• Chicago Metra — rider chatbot built with Twilio and Azure Cognitive Services on AWS Lambda; riders check transit-card balances by phone, text, or email.
• Urban Insights — transit-demand machine learning and search in Jupyter and SageMaker, monitored with Prometheus and Grafana.
• Build and release — automated CI/CD for 20 Java apps with Jenkins, Ansible, Docker, Helm, Vault, Terraform, and Kubernetes on Azure; database migrations via Liquibase and SQL*Plus.

Senior Software Engineer | Cubic Transportation Systems

2017 to 2019 | Washington, DC

First DevOps engineer on Cubic's fare platforms, moving embedded and legacy systems to containers and cloud.

• NextBus — real-time bus-arrival prediction on AWS ECS and Lambda with TensorFlow, PySpark, CloudFormation, and Node.js.
• First DevOps engineer — led the transformation for a publicly traded company with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker; embedded fare CI/CD with Jenkins, Conan, and Wind River Linux.
• Security and compliance — PCI, SOC 2, ISO, and SOX audits; AWS and Azure hardened with Trend DSA, Nessus, and Cisco ASAv, monitored with Prometheus and Grafana.

Senior Software Engineer | EPAM Systems

2016 to 2017 | Washington, DC

Senior backend engineer at a digital agency, shipping search, payments, and mobile apps for enterprise clients.

• Fannie Mae Collateral Underwriter — Angular single-page app on Tomcat with JSON and REST APIs in Python; appraisers value a home on a mortgage.
• Lockheed Martin Intranet Search — enterprise search on headless Drupal; microservices on Docker and Kubernetes with Node.js and Python.
• Release engineering — Jenkins, TeamCity, and Sonatype Nexus CI/CD on AWS with Chef; PostgreSQL migrations with Liquibase and a zero-downtime multi-tenant switch.

Software Engineer | EPAM Systems

2015 to 2016 | Washington, DC

Backend engineer on a full-stack team building mobile apps and e-commerce for national brands.

• Poison Control — National Capital Poison Center iPhone and Android apps built with Cordova CLI, shipped via App Store, TestFlight, and Google Play.
• Canadian Tire Hybris store and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops app on AWS, with RDS and ElastiCache behind Kubernetes and Docker.
• Infrastructure — Docker and Ansible on VMware ESXi with Ubuntu and CentOS behind Cisco ASA firewalls; provisioned with Vagrant and Chef.
• Test automation — Node, Karma, Jasmine, PhantomJS, WebDriver, and Protractor; JMeter and BlazeMeter performance tests; SVN-to-Git migration.

Projects

Io Pictures Corporation - Founding Engineer

Architecture for rights, metadata, payments, storage, and digital distribution systems from zero to production.

The Archive of American Radio, Inc. - Founding Engineer

Architecture for search, RAG retrieval, metadata extraction, AI agent workflows, content processing, and API systems from zero to production.

Skills

• Core: Software architecture, platform architecture, distributed systems, system design, site reliability engineering, SRE, incident response, on-call, backend services, APIs
• Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, Packer, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Smallstep, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity, Nexus, Vault, ECS, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache, Linux
• Languages: Go, Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, PostgreSQL, Liquibase, Redis, Kafka
• AI/ML: LLM, AI agents, RAG, machine learning, MLOps, vector search, hybrid search, BM25, ANN/KNN, entity extraction, intent classification, Kubeflow, TensorFlow, PySpark, SageMaker, Azure Cognitive Services
• Security: mTLS, CrowdStrike, Nessus, Trend Micro, Cisco ASA, PCI, SOC 2, ISO, SOX
• Search: Search indexing, ETL, offline evaluation, experiment design, Lucene, Solr, OpenTelemetry