# Michaël Ortali > Ramen lover – Principal Engineer @GlossGenius. Ex-CashApp, Ex-Square, Ex-Pinterest, Ex-YouTube/Google, Ex-Yahoo! Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/michalortali Michaël is currently a principal engineer @ GlossGenius and a technical advisor for multiple startups; he previously worked at Square, CashApp, Pinterest, YouTube/Google, Yahoo!, and The Orchard (acquired by Sony). He led a team at Square focused on developing a customer search and discovery platform, while leading technical conventions for their Developer APIs. Before, he was at The Orchard on the management team. He transitioned the company to embrace continuous deployments and migrated it to a microservice architecture while growing the Software Architecture Team. Before The Orchard, Michaël worked at Pinterest to contribute to several core initiatives (ads, discovery, internationalization, user education, and engineering processes). In addition to his engineering career, Michaël mentored students at Holberton School (San Francisco), ran an international French Meetup group (while42) to share experiences and knowledge, advises startups, founded two initiatives to help creatives (Fllio and CreativeList), and loves to travel (50+ countries). ## Work Experience ### Principal Engineer @ GlossGenius Jan 2024 – Present | Miami, Florida, United States ### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ GlossGenius Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Miami, Florida, United States As a Senior Staff Engineer reporting directly to the CTO, I spearhead our company's backend technical strategy and stack. I lead critical high-impact initiatives, empower engineering teams, and drive departmental growth. Beyond my core responsibilities, I've authored long-term product visions that underpin new developments, propelling us upmarket and solidifying our product's position within the wellness industry. Translating business goals into action, I've spearheaded definition and execution of strategic engineering efforts like our migration to a service-oriented architecture (Kotlin, Micronaut, gRPC). I've consistently elevated technical and product execution by refining processes, strengthening documentation, and establishing best practices. Notably, I've owned the development of mission-critical systems including our new payment and user infrastructure, alongside user-centric features like multi-factor authentication. Recognizing cross-team bottlenecks, I championed the creation of stack-focused groups, fostering collaboration and boosting departmental productivity. To support our hyper-growth and maturing business, I've played a key role in scaling our technical department. This includes collaborating with managers to identify skill gaps, refining our technical interview process, spearheading the creation of our engineering career ladder, and providing resources to accelerate onboarding. Additionally, I actively mentor and coach engineers of all levels, as well as peers across various disciplines (project managers, designers). ### Advisor @ Atmosfy Jan 2021 – Present | Miami, Florida, United States ### Senior Staff Software Engineer (L7) @ Square Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Miami, Florida, United States As a senior staff software engineer, my role consists of leading high-impact initiatives throughout the company, setting the architectural direction, and defining long-term goals and strategic areas for investment. Over the past four years, I've helped the Customer organization's growth through hiring, directly managing, and leveling-up individuals. I authored and architected a cloud-based customer search platform (20+ billion datapoints, K+ QPS, trillions of variations) which enabled the revamp of our first-party product and the introduction of new features for external developers. I introduced elasticsearch at Square, then socialized the technology by running multiple workshops, holding office hours, and establishing an internal community. I also owned the development of Square's Customer APIs, introduced new patterns (search, custom fields), and participated in company-wide discussions to standardize our public APIs. I authored and established a long-term vision and technical direction to introduce omnichannel buyers into our ecosystem, which deepened the relationship between buyers, sellers, developers, and Square. At a company level, I improved our engineering ladder and wrote guides to help engineers think more about their career advancement. In November 2020 I joined Cash to work on the payment state machine, and internationalization. ### Strategic Advisor @ Gotham Source Partners Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area As an advisor, I help Gotham Partner and several other startups at Grand Tech Central on product strategy, technology, and people management. ### Founder, Personal Project @ Fllio Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | New York City Fllio is a platform dedicated to helping creatives collaborate, engage and be hired for specific missions. From this project, two initiatives were born: www.fllio.com (an inclusive network for creatives with more than 5k members) and www.creativelist.io (a search engine to find creatives from all over the world, 150k registered creatives). ### Software Architect @ The Orchard Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Greater New York City Area As a software architect and manager of the Software Architecture Team, my role was to ensure the good standing of the overall architecture by contributing to technical specs, by analyzing existing tools and platforms, by managing feature developments, optimizing engineering workflows, by creating engineering standards, and by mentoring engineers. Over two years, some of the major projects included leading the engineering team in transitioning from a monolithic codebase to a polyglot distributed microservice architecture on Amazon (EC2, DynamoDB, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Consul, Nginx, Docker, Php, NodeJs, Python), improving the SDLC processes (test coverage, coding styleguides, CI/CD, code reviews), developing standards (security, logging, communication security between microservices), and building core tools (authentication/authorization libraries, API gateway). ### Senior Software Engineer @ Pinterest Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Bay Area Joined Pinterest as a software engineer, but my responsibilities evolved based on the needs of the company. My 5 main areas of focus were monetization (ads), internationalization, discovery, user education and engineering processes. In addition to my engineering role, I managed junior engineers and trained new hires about our different technologies. ### Lead Software Engineer & Manager @ Google - YouTube Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Bay Area As part of the YouTube WebDev team, my main projects included twice leading the redesign of the YouTube, leading the evolution of our front-end infrastructure with the collaboration of the UX team, creating and managing the YouTube Webmaster team. Aside from those main responsibilities, I have also been a key contributor to many teams including YouTube Search, YouTube Social, YouTube Slam, YouTube Topics (Paris), YouTube EDU (Zurich), YouTube Homepage (Los Angeles), YouTube Account (Los Angeles), and our support team. ### Front-End Engineer @ Yahoo! Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 As a front-end engineer in the Small Business team, I created prototypes and collaborated on feature development for the group's flagship site building tool. ### PHP/Flash/AS3 Developer @ AgencyNet Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 For this award-winning agency, I designed and created web applications for various clients such as Bacardi and Grey Goose. ### Web Developer @ Mediaplazza Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 Mediaplazza creates mobile content. My primary responsibilities were to develop their products by implementing desktop and mobile web pages, by contributing to the API (PHP) and to participate in roadmap meetings. ### Web developer and Graphic designer @ Marathon Media Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 Marathon Media is a film/animation company well-known for their kid tv shows. My work consisted of developing websites and creating graphic elements. ### PHP Developer @ Skyrock Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 Skyrock is the most viewed French website, with 200 million monthly visits. My role consisted of adding new features, creating tools to facilitate website administration, and creating new discovery channels. ### Web Developer & Designer @ Thiers Optique Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 Thiers Optique, an optician shop in Le Havre, wanted a website with a clean, sober interface to clearly put forth the store image: « Aller à l’essentiel » ("Getting Down to Basics"). For this project, I provided consulting, proposing several different visual solutions. After having clearly defined and identified their needs, I developed their first website. ## Education ### Bac +3 in Création et Développement de produits numériques en ligne GOBELINS Paris ### Professional Bachelor in Computer Science Paris-Sud University (Paris XI) ### Lycee Saint Joseph ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/xethorn --- Source: https://flows.cv/michalortali JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/michalortali/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12