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My Education:
Bachelors of Science in Computer Science
University of California, Santa Cruz
Attended: June '15 to March '18
Associates of Science in Computer Science
Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, CA
Attended: January '13 to June '15
  Wow, what a couple of years to start a career working with the cloud across industries. My name is Mitchell Etzel and I've decided to maintain this blog to help foster and share some of my experiences, in the hope that others may find them useful. I'm dedicating this website to the study of distributed systems, and cyber-security, because they're all around us and in most of the web services we use nowadays. As an industry, we are quickly discovering that the web services we use are not as secure as we once imagined them to be. One of the best goals that this blog could hope to achieve is shedding a better light on how to make distributed systems more secure in general.

Relevant Work History:

Senior Engineer II, Cloud - McKinsey & Company May 2022 - April 2024

Division: Cloud Foundation

Focus as Lead over 3 teams: Improve the N.A. AWS Cloud Foundation Implementation & Spend

Main Languages: Golang, Terraform, Shell

Main Cloud Platforms Worked With: AWS, Azure

Operating Costs Reduced: ~40-50% a month in cloud spend

  • Lead multiple work-streams focused on deliverables during client engagements, both on-site and remotely
  • Applied a security-first mindset to cloud security guardrails (e.g.: dynamic Service Control Policies for boundaries)
  • Implemented several Policy as Code tools across all supported Cloud Service Providers for the Firm's Foundation
  • Worked on and presented multiple Proof-of-Concept Generative AI projects using the OpenAI service on Azure
  • Drove improvements across the Firm including Architecture deliverables, Coding Practices, and Security postures

Senior Cloud Engineer - BryterCX May 2021 - May 2022

Team: Special Operations

Focus as Team Lead: Migrating Cost Optimized SaaS Clients w/ Terraform & EMR

Main Languages: Golang, Terraform, Shell

Main Cloud Platforms Worked With: AWS, Terraform Cloud

Operating Costs Reduced: >$300,000 a month saved

Main Solo Project:
  • Architect, build, and automate a scale-able, Petabyte-sized EMR cluster
  • Manage YARN, HBase, and Presto all running on a single set of EMR core nodes
  • Implement an EMR health service for graceful scale out/in without data-loss
  • Provided HBase scaling functionality AWS doesn’t offer publicly or in beta

Software Engineer - Effectual June 2020 - May 2021

Team: Professional Services

Focus as Team Lead: Migrating Corporations Into AWS Cloud Native Environments

Main Languages: Java, NodeJS, React

Main Cloud Platforms Worked With: AWS

Main Solo Project:
  • Lead AWS migration contracts for a Multi-Million Dollar Big Data SaaS product
  • Championed a repeatable, layered approach to writing Terraform Modules
  • Contributed to Presto's Open Source to fix issues found in above work

Software Engineer - Les Schwab November 2019 - May 2020

Team: Research, Architecture, and Development(RAD)

Team Focus: Designing/Implementing the Next Gen. Solutions for Les Schwab

Main Languages: NodeJS, React, Angular

Main Cloud Platforms Worked With: AWS, Azure

Main Solo Projects:
  • Increased security, testing, and efficiencies in existing projects/templates
  • Architected/implemented the E.T.L. of million(+) record DynamoDB tables
  • Independently wrote new tools/systems to improve customer interactions

Software Engineer - ShieldX Networks June 2018 - July 2019

Software Engineer/Exploit Researcher: January 2019 - July 2019


Team: Security/Exploit Mitigation Platform

Team Focus: Ensuring the Functionality/Quality of the ShieldX Security Offerings

Main Languages: C, Regular Expressions, XML

Main Exploit Report Companies Worked With: Telus, Idappcom, MITRE(CVE), ExploitDB

Main Solo Projects:
  • False Positive Fixes/Monitoring Customer Data
  • Honeypot Setup/Research into Newly Seen Exploits
  • Generate a Majority of the New 2019 Exploit Coverage

Software Engineer: June 2018 - January 2019


Team: Factory/Orchestration(Back-end) Team

Team Focus: Integrating the ShieldX Product with On/Off Premise Cloud Platforms

Main Languages: Java, Python, Bash

Main Cloud Platforms Worked With: VMware, Azure, AWS

Main Solo Projects:
  • Azure Load Balancer Sandwich Setup Automation
  • Deploy Microservice Instance to a VM Folder (VMware)
  • Multi-cloud VM Tag Discovery and use with Resource Groups

Student Internship - Product Owner January 2017 - June 2017

 Internship through the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering’s Corporate Sponsorship Program:

  • SmartRevenue, a market research firm based out of Connecticut, came to us as a group of students requesting help prototyping a system for determining a consumer’s “digital path to purchase”
  • Lead a team of 4 other students as Product Owner for the Data Collection Team, we focused on the URLs visited and Android Applications used when participants opted into our software
  • Our team developed both a Chrome Extension and Android Application to help collect data from the pool of over 50,000 people they use in their demographic studies
  • Created a website using Amazon Web Services to act as an Administration Panel/Web Interface for our Applications and Database