# Michael L.

> Staff Software Engineer at PayPal

Location: San Jose, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/michaell1

● Strong knowledge of:   Spring, OpenAPI, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, Poetry, Jenkins, GraphQL, Kitex, Thrift
● Comfortable with:        Kubernetes, AWS, Kafka, ElasticSearch, Express, Oracle, Mongo, MySQL, Redis, Unreal
● Some exposure to:       Android, Keras, Rabbit, Bevy, Kraken, Axum, Couch, Datadog, GCP, PCF

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ PayPal
Jan 2025 – Present | San Jose, California, United States

### Senior Software Engineer @ TikTok
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Jose, California, United States
● Realized $1M in accrued revenue from internally unresolved payment chargebacks ($5M in TPV)
● Served as a reviewer for TikTok's official engineering blog (TikTok for Developers)
● Delivered real-time fraud detection and insight support for LATAM payment transactions
● Led cross-functional team of 13 volunteers to activate TikTok's US Engineering HQ for office events
● Introduced regression testing into TikTok's payment chargeback infrastructure
● Convinced Product to prioritize sunsetting a legacy platform, after many delays
● Translated Portuguese language correspondence for the Chinese engineering leaders
● Introduced application-level health monitoring for TikTok's external vendor platform

### Staff Software Engineer @ PayPal
Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Chicago, Illinois, United States
● Led one workstream at the center of Quantum Leap, PayPal's top enterprise priority of 2023.
● Served as the sole Engineering Editor of the PayPal Technology Blog.
● Owned a high traffic component in PayPal's primary revenue center (64k TPS on 5.6k boxes).
● Introduced multi-cloud environments to PayPal for a bleeding edge pilot project.
● Led team of six engineers to safely migrate and decommission legacy C++ components from the 1990s.
● Authored training curriculum for new engineers and product managers in the primary revenue center.
● Mentored and trained senior engineers on their career development.
● Inspired another engineer to start learning Korean!

### Senior Software Engineer @ PayPal
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Chicago, Illinois, United States
● Gave the #1 most-liked and #4 most-viewed internal tech talk in PayPal history, attended by 660 people.
● Led new team charter for PayPal’s primary revenue center to improve engineering best practices.
● Delivered the closing tech talk for one track of the semiannual PayPal Architecture Forum.
● Owned core platform that orchestrates $500M USD per year in transaction volume.
● Improved P0/P1 TTD from 1 hour to 15 minutes by introducing new leading indicators.
● Mentored and trained juniors and mid-level ICs to be promoted, and interns to be hired.
● Convinced another team to accept responsibility for a P0 Incident.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Datasite
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
● Owned the primary revenue stream's maintenance and monitoring.
● Authored new training curriculum and onboarding system for Python development.
● Led and trained team of seven engineers.
● Saved Financial Analysts dozens of hours per month by automating their end-of-month book closing.
● Saved Customer Service from their most stressful task with a new self-diagnosis tool to detect availability issues,
● Created internal tool platform to resolve extraordinary requests from the company's largest customers.
● Bootstrapped automation for special, language-localized marketing e-mails for global customers.

### Software Engineer @ Datasite
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
● Saved $10M per year in perpetuity by retiring the legacy flagship, without losing any customers.
● Served as point-person for cross-functional rapid development during production emergencies.
● Saved hundreds of labor hours per month by introducing automation for dozens of common tasks.
● Served as Subject Matter Expert for technical issues with customer billing.
● Solely responsible for secure, automated disposal of sensitive customer financial and legal documents.
● Led and trained team of five Engineers to fix bugs and add features to customer-facing software.
● Improved SLA compliance from 82% to 96% with a new browser extension for Salesforce.
● Translated French and Portuguese customer bug reports for engineering leadership to prioritize.
● Delivered new tools to measure microservice performance and customer-facing 500 error trends.
● Responsible for aggregating data for special reports to Executives.
● Awarded for outstanding employee performance and innovation in Q1 2019.
● Fixed the coffee machine!

### Software Engineer @ Puny Human
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Seoul, South Korea
● Modernized legacy C++ product for re-release on next generation platforms
● Implemented diegetic 3D UI designs for Virtual Reality (VR)

### High School Mathematics Teacher @ Private International Schools and Universities
Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Seoul, South Korea
● Lectured Calculus, Trigonometry, Geometry, Algebra, and Gifted for grades 6 to 12.
● Improvised French lessons for the entire student body, to prepare for a field trip to Paris.
● Authored syllabus and lesson plans for a new AP Calculus course.
● Authored new formative and summative assessments, per CA & NY standards.
● Managed classes ranging in size from 8 to 25 students.
● Taught Social Studies and Physical Education to cover for coworkers' sabbaticals.
● Tutored students in Chemistry and Spanish for their homework, after school.
● Counseled victims of bullying.

### Mathematics Tutor @ Louisiana State University
Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 | Baton Rouge, LA
● Helped anyone who came through the door, for free, with all their homework and test prep
● Tutored upper courses: Abstract Algebra, Advanced Calculus, Differential Equations, & Chaos Theory
● Tutored lower courses: Calculus, Pre-Calculus, Trigonometry, Geometry, & Discrete Math


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/micaele1

---
Source: https://flows.cv/michaell1
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/michaell1/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22