# Mike LaRocca > Staff Engineer Infrastructure at Flock Freight Location: San Diego, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/mikelarocca With six years of hands-on experience, I have consistently delivered successful solutions across the full software development lifecycle, focusing on high-traffic systems and advanced cloud architectures. My work spans a diverse range of programming languages, where I’ve designed, optimized, and managed build, delivery, and deployment pipelines for both microservice and monolithic architectures. I’m adept at navigating the trade-offs inherent in complex problem spaces, always aiming to enhance the developer experience tailored to the company's scale and needs. While I thrive in cloud-native environments, I value frugality, cost efficiency, and budget management. Recently, I've developed key features for ML model training and inference service deployment pipelines. I love being outdoors, hiking, snowboarding, and doing yoga/handstands. Music and art are both essential in life, as are fine wine, good craft brew, and pour over coffee. :-) I'm driven by a passion for leadership and innovation, seeking to contribute to products and companies that will shape the future of technology. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer Infrastructure @ Flock Freight Jan 2023 – Present | Encinitas, California, United States Infrastructure at Flock encompasses Developer Experience, SRE, and Machine Learning Infra. While I partake in all of these buckets to some extent I have a greater focus on the Developer Experience bucket. This includes CI/CD, Local Development, and productivity tooling. Outside of DevEx I play a key role in maintaining the budget for our largest line items (Cloud, Monitoring, and CI). Over the last year and a half, the most impactful project I executed on was to scale our CI system from 25 -> 100 engineers. We did this by improving an in-house metric called PRs/hr (rate of how many Pull Requests we can merge in an hour) from a max rate of 4 to a max rate of 9 through a batch merging process, without decreasing on the quality gates required for merge. ### Senior Software Engineer Infrastructure @ Flock Freight Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Diego, California, United States Flock Freight, a 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50 winner, is a technology company that’s reducing waste and inefficiency by reinventing the supply chain. First to market with advanced algorithms that enable supply chain optimization by pooling shipments, Flock Freight creates a new standard of service for shippers, increases revenue for carriers, and eliminates the impact of carbon emissions through shared truckload service. Flock Freight is the only company that offers carbon neutral shared truckload shipping at point of sale — for free. We’re also the first in the freight space to earn a B Corporation certification, which serves as evidence of our dedication to our team, our community, and our planet. If you want to work where impact meets innovation, join our team! Visit https://flockfreight.com/careers to apply for an open role. ### DevOps Engineer @ MayStreet Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 - Writing Terraform modules to import existing and create new cloud infrastructure as code. - Deployments to AWS EKS and individual EC2 hosts through Ansible. - Deployment and maintenance of 3rd party and in-house applications for a userbase to support financial data access and analysis (Gitlab, Jupyterlab, Plotly/Dash) Recently completed project: Design/development of a custom CI/CD pipeline for AWS Lambda Functions via GitlabCI ### Software Engineer @ Galley Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater San Diego Area Primary developing full-stack features for Galley's enterprise back-of-house kitchen management software in a TypeScript environment with React and GraphQL... doing lots of DevOps too! Recently Completed... CI/CD with GitOps and ArgoCD • Migrating all CI pipelines to Jenkins • Deploying to different environments via ArgoCD • Structuring deployments through GitOps Completed projects... Containerization and Kubernetes • Migrated our Heroku application to containerized apps hosted on Amazon EKS. • Used Terraform to code our infrastructure. •Leveraged CodeBuild/CodePipeline to set up a deploy workflow for Testing, Staging, and Prod. Nutrition Interface • Allows for dynamic nutrition data calculation for a recipe based on the recipe's components. • Comprehensive error reporting to audit nutrition data. • A nutrition label interface that allows for FDA-compliant label export. • Components table section showing the nutrition contribution and data from all the recipes components. • An FDA-comliant label can be exported in both horizontal and vertical formats and comes prepopulated with an ingredient list (sorted by weight) and an allergens section that can both be customized. ### Jr. Software Engineer @ Zeeto Group Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater San Diego Area Primarily built full-stack features into a Drupal 8 + Serverless AWS application. - Redesigned the infrastructure and deploy process to pursue CD. - Leveraged AWS ECS, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, Load Balancers, and CodeBuild to host containerized Drupal applications. - Orchestrated the infrastructure in Ansible - Reduced deploy times 2 hours to 20 minutes - Decreased infrastructure costs by 40%. - Mob programming. ### Software Developer Internship @ 7CTOs Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater San Diego Area - Developed a one-on-one chat interface into an existing React Native app with a Ruby/Rails backend API that allows users of the 7’s app to communicate directly. - Expanded the chat interface to support interest-based chats as well as group chats from backend to mobile UI. ### Student @ LEARN Academy Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Diego Working mostly in a pair programming setting we completed over 12 projects designed to target specific levels of Full Stack Web App design and development such as, • MVC principles • Front-end DOM manipulation and interactivity with JavaScript • Responsive design using Flex-box and Bootstrap • API creation and RESTful route principles with Rails as the API communicating with React • Multi-use component design and single page web-applications with React.js • Object Oriented Programming • Test and Behavior Driven Development with Jest/Enzyme and Rspec • Database CRUD principles, Relational DB design, and SQL queries with Postgres • Authentication and Authorization concepts with tools like JWT, Knock, CanCan, and Rolify • Source control and open source contribution with Git and Github • Agile development philosophy in multiple group project settings. ### Database/Manufacturing Consultant @ BioSpyder Technologies Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Greater San Diego Area Biospyder provides RNA sequencing kits and services. • Trained employees in both Database and Manufacturing Operations. • Scaled Database size by 100%. • Initiated development of two flagship products. ### Database Designer/Oligonucleotide Manager @ BioSpyder Technologies Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Carlsbad, CA • Designed a MySQL oligonucleotide inventory database for product development, record tracking, and custom requests. • Self-taught using Stanford Lagunita DB Series • Developed automated (Biomek Fx) oligonucleotide pooling and PCR plate manufacturing processes with QC checks. • Delivered products for EPA grant deadlines. • Completed development of three flagship products and numerous custom pools. ### Self Employed @ Self-Employed Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Greater San Diego Area I provided Personal Training and Massage Therapy services to the San Diego region. • Managed a 25+ cliente network with a main hub at Nakoa Fitness and Physical Therapy. • Exercise programming and Manual Therapy techniques designed to target client goals including weight loss, pain management, athletic performance. ### Product Management @ Herzan Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Orange County, California Area Herzan develops and manufactures products and services focused around Vibration Isolation, Acoustic Isolation, and Electromagnetic Isolation for high performance research equipment. • Reduced costs by 39.4% and increased margins by 22.3% • Managed a Hardware developer and C#/.NET Software Developer. • Completed a hardware redesign, logo rebranding, and case design on a small budget. • Performed Site Surveys for Electron Microscope and MRI installations. • Wrote the User Manual ### Data Analyst and Tester @ Herzan Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Orange County, California Area • Analyzed vibration, acoustic, and electromagnetic data to determine product performance. • Standardized templates for logging test data and reporting results to increase reporting efficiency and quality. ## Education ### Web Developer in Full Stack Ruby on Rails with React LEARN Academy Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 ### Bachelor's Degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology UC Santa Barbara Jan 2008 – Jan 2012 ### Certified Massage Therapist in Massage Therapy/Therapeutic Massage Santa Barbara Body Therapy Institute Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 ### High School Diploma in General Studies Dana Hills High School Jan 2004 – Jan 2008 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/laroccintheworld --- Source: https://flows.cv/mikelarocca JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mikelarocca/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22