Los Angeles, CA | U.S. Citizen

https://mikevincent.dev

Education

University of Texas at Tyler

Master of Science, Industrial Engineering, 2015

The Pennsylvania State University

Bachelor of Science, Linguistics, 2011

The Pennsylvania State University

Bachelor of Arts, Journalism, 2011

Experience

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

September 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

October 2021 to April 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

October 2019 to October 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

May 2017 to October 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

May 2016 to April 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

May 2015 to April 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