Michael Ragan

Full-Stack Engineering Lead

Exchange-grade product systems for teams that need speed without fragility.

I lead full-stack engineering across real-time platforms, cloud infrastructure, and legacy modernization - turning architectural bottlenecks into systems teams can ship with confidence.

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17 yearsEngineering production systems
10M+Daily requests on cloud platforms
500msTarget latency for live exchange data
Positioning

A senior technical partner for systems that cannot afford vague ownership.

Michael Ragan is a full-stack engineering lead with 17 years building systems that move and protect money. He excels at 0-to-1 delivery in small, fast-moving teams: designing APIs, building frontends, operating distributed services, mentoring engineers, and moving teams from cautious release cycles to daily delivery.

Selected Work

Recent systems with direct business impact.

MEMX · Lead Software Engineer · 2025-Present

IPO auction administration platform

Architected and built a greenfield platform that books, controls, and monitors live auction data against existing order book and quoting APIs, writing the entire Node.js backend and 90% of the React frontend with one junior frontend engineer.

  • Delivered in 4 months while leading a 4-engineer team across all MEMX applications.
  • Took the platform to live beta with a client, removing the need for dedicated staff to monitor auctions continuously.
  • Designed WebSocket streaming for auction lists, order book updates, and auction metrics at 500ms max latency.
  • Handled block orders of 100+ orders (millions of shares) with last-write-wins concurrency and a RESTful mutation layer.
  • Implemented three-tier Okta-backed RBAC with JWT validation on every request, LRU caching, rate limiting, and standardized API errors.
  • Built the test suite from scratch (36 component and 8 Playwright E2E tests) at ~90% coverage with no dedicated QA.
Convera · Lead Full-Stack Engineer · 2024-2025

Payment modernization and compliance workflows

Led an 8-person pod extracting payment functionality from a monolith into microservices and shipping the MVP two weeks early without major production issues.

  • Built React and TypeScript dashboards for transaction, KYC, and sanctions workflows serving 100K+ daily users.
  • Designed Node.js and AWS Lambda APIs handling 50K+ requests per day, with a GraphQL layer in front of payment approval.
  • Built a DynamoDB audit pipeline (Streams, Lambda, Postgres) with fraud and velocity checks.
  • Moved releases from every few days to multiple deploys per day with GitLab CI, Docker, and AWS EKS, gated at 80% coverage.
  • Improved throughput 45% by tuning PostgreSQL queries and Python data scripts.
  • Co-led a company-wide AI adoption initiative using Cursor and Claude, with all generated code held to review and coverage bars.
Oracle · Principal Software Engineer · 2017-2024

Cloud platforms, support automation, and enterprise identity

Led monolith-to-microservice efforts, operated Kubernetes workloads at scale, and built systems that reduced support burden while helping product teams deploy independently.

  • Maintained production OCI Kubernetes clusters serving 10M+ requests per day at 99.99% uptime.
  • Built the Oracle Digital Assistant backend, cutting first-line support tickets from ~700-800 to 350-450 per month.
  • Designed Java/Spring backends for 500GB+ datasets and implemented SAML/OpenID SSO for enterprise customers.
  • Mentored 15+ engineers through architecture, delivery, and code review practices.
Oracle & Primavera · Technical Support to Senior Software Engineer · 2008-2017

From technical support to distributed backend engineering

Moved from supporting high-availability systems into engineering, shipping production code within the first year and growing into backend and frontend ownership across enterprise products.

  • Built distributed Java, Spring, and Hibernate services with Maven consistency across 20+ microservices.
  • Built PHP/Perl SSO that cut login issues from about a dozen per month to 5-6 per year.
  • Shipped embeddable JavaScript libraries and PHP/MySQL services adopted by 50+ enterprise customers.
  • Built the Premium Content Builder, a Flex low/no-code tool over 500,000 documents, and a jQuery library that cut document creation from 72 to 12 hours.
  • Cut build times by more than half by improving CI/CD with Jenkins and Docker.

Capabilities

Full-stack leadership from interface to infrastructure.

01

Distributed Product Systems

System design, real-time data flow, WebSocket streaming, API contracts, concurrency, and reliability.

02

Modern Frontends

React, TypeScript, Next.js, GraphQL, Redux/RTK, data-heavy dashboards, and Jest/Playwright testing.

03

Cloud Architecture

AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, EKS), Kubernetes, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and capacity planning.

04

Identity & Access

OAuth, SAML, JWT, RBAC, Okta, enterprise SSO, plus fintech workflows: KYC, sanctions screening, and fraud checks.

Proof Points

Measured outcomes across scale, quality, and delivery.

3xFaster feature shipping after breaking monoliths into independently deployable services.
99.99%Uptime maintained on production Kubernetes clusters through planning and chaos testing.
70%Processing time reduction after data model and query optimization on large datasets.
75%Monthly bug count reduction (8 to 2) after pushing Jest and Playwright coverage into team delivery habits.

Side Projects

Practical tools built around data, systems, and hiring workflows.

JSON-to-PostgreSQL Schema Generator

Python analyzer that reverse-engineers JSON contracts into indexed PostgreSQL schemas.

Resume & Application Tracking System

Next.js, Go, and PostgreSQL application for lifecycle tracking, reminders, and JWT-authenticated APIs.

Real-Time Metrics Dashboard

FastAPI and WebSocket dashboard handling 1,000+ events per second with sub-100ms latency.

Contact

Build the system, unblock the team, and leave the platform stronger.

michael@ragan.pro(610) 657-6356View Resume