Software Engineering Leader

Mike
Ferrari

Twenty years building software, leading teams, and untangling hard systems.

My work sits where software engineering, cloud infrastructure, automation, and AI meet. I like taking complicated systems apart, understanding why they became hard to maintain, and rebuilding them into something simpler and faster — for the engineers and the business.

See the work ↗ mike@digitalferrari.com

Mike Ferrari, software engineering leader

Twenty years building software. A publishing platform that peaked at 22 properties. Millions of newsletters a year. 70,000+ registered users. Systems built to hold up.

70,000+

Registered users on a first-party data platform I built

~$220K

Annual software cost eliminated through publishing automation

15s → 3.5s

Article publish time cut by moving work off the request path

~$84K/yr

Storage & egress cost being cut by migrating images from S3 to Cloudflare R2

What I do

An engineer first. Management came later.

Because of that, I approach leadership the same way I approach a system: understand it, find the bottlenecks, remove what isn't necessary, and help everyone move faster.

The projects I enjoy most need both technical depth and business understanding. Sometimes that's cloud architecture. Sometimes it's modernizing a legacy application, integrating AI into an existing workflow, or helping a team work through years of accumulated technical debt.

These days my focus is less about writing every line myself and more about helping teams build the right systems, make good technical decisions, and ship software that holds up.

The technology changes. The process doesn't. Understand the problem. Build the simplest thing that will still make sense in five years.

Engineering philosophy

Good software isn't measured by clever code. It's measured by how easily the next engineer can understand, maintain, and extend it.

Readable over clever Automation over repetition Observability over guessing Simple over abstract Shipping useful over chasing perfect

I like systems that quietly do their job for years.

Mike Ferrari working — Still in the code — from wherever the work happens to be.

Selected work

Systems built to hold up.

01 / 2026Technical Direction · AI-built

SwiftSend — Serverless Email Platform

With AWS Pinpoint reaching end-of-support, I directed the from-scratch replacement for an 11-site newspaper network sending millions of newsletters a year — designed and built, with the cutover in progress. I owned the requirements and drove the architecture; an AI coding agent implemented under my direction. I traced chronic stale-newsletter sends to a race condition living in the old architecture and designed around content assembled at fire time with immutable dated sends, which makes stale sends structurally impossible. Per-publication IAM isolation removes a whole class of cross-tenant leaks by construction.

I paired it with Swift Auth — subscriber identity, entitlement verification, and paywall access behind cryptographically signed Ed25519 magic links — and specified the analytics pipeline it was built to, with SES events flowing through Kinesis Firehose to S3 and Athena for history.

AWS · SES · Lambda · EventBridge Scheduler · SQS · DynamoDB · Firehose · Athena · TypeScript · AWS CDK

02Platform

Registration & Identity Platform

Designed and built a registration platform spanning multiple digital publications, growing to more than 70,000 registered users and giving the business a real first-party customer data platform. Built the subscription and paywall systems alongside it — checkout, payment handling, fraud prevention, and institutional access across a network of publications.

AWS Cognito · DynamoDB · Stripe · React · WordPress multisite

03Automation

Publishing & Editorial Automation

Redesigned parts of the editorial workflow by connecting WordPress to Adobe InDesign automation, cutting manual production work and eliminating roughly $220,000 in annual software costs. Built the XML export pipeline delivering WordPress content to print production, designed around the assumption that delivery will sometimes fail and someone will need to see exactly why.

WordPress · Adobe InDesign automation · XML pipelines · AWS Lambda

04AI Tooling

Internal AI Tools

Built AI-powered newsroom tools — Ask the Editor and Ask Bessie — that help editors review articles, generate constructive feedback, suggest follow-up stories, summarize documents, process audio, and automate repetitive editorial work. I was integrating large language models into production software before it became the center of every conference talk — practical AI that saves people time, not demos.

OpenAI · Google · Mistral · Meta · Retrieval-augmented search · Transcription

05Independent

Things I Build on My Own Time

identithing.com — an AI-centric asset-identification app. Launched, live, and running on infrastructure I pay for myself. Plus a reading platform built around discovery — because finding your next book shouldn't feel like homework. Paying for my own infra is a good forcing function: it keeps the economics honest.

AI vision & identification · Model-agnostic inference · Serverless · Self-funded

Leadership & ownership

I became the technical owner of an entire publishing platform.

Over the years I went from writing plugins to owning the whole thing — cloud infrastructure, authentication, subscriptions, payments, messaging, AI tooling, performance, and the engineering operations behind a network of high-traffic news and magazine sites that peaked at 22 properties and now runs 11.

For the past three years I've been the engineering owner of that platform — the systems behind roughly 24 million readers a year and on the order of 48 million annual sessions. I inherited a strong foundation from the team before me and have kept it fast, reliable, and evolving ever since. On a property that size, "the site is up" is the whole job, and it stays up.

I led the engineering and digital-operations team — developers, designers, customer service, a videographer — set the standards, managed vendors, and ran incident response. I've mentored developers and delivered technical training to hundreds of employees.

The manager's job is to make engineers more successful: remove blockers, improve process, provide context, and give people room to make decisions. I enjoy helping engineers grow about as much as I enjoy solving the problems myself.

I kept the platform running and evolving through three rounds of layoffs — eventually becoming the sole engineer and manager responsible for it. When the team got smaller, the systems still had to hold up. So I built them to.

Still hands-on, still cutting cost: I'm currently migrating our newspaper images from S3 to Cloudflare R2 to eliminate roughly $84,000 a year in storage and egress — a move that's repeatable across the wider network for a further six figures in identified savings.

Before software · around the world

U.S. Navy veteran — trained a division of sailors and built custom tools to track dry-dock and work schedules, back when a spreadsheet was the automation. Eagle Scout, Order of the Arrow. These days the work travels: built on infrastructure I pay for myself, from a rotating set of time zones.

Technical background

Most of my career is web applications and cloud services.

I care less about specific languages than about building systems that are reliable, maintainable, observable, and easy to change. I've designed and maintained automation across AWS, led engineering teams, and delivered technical training to hundreds of employees.

JavaScriptTypeScriptPHP Node.jsPythonBash SQLReactWordPress AWSLambdaLambda@Edge CloudFrontCognitoSES API GatewayEventBridgeDynamoDB AthenaFirehoseAWS CDK MySQLPostgresRedis DockerStripeOAuth 2.0 REST APIsLLMs / AI

Get in touch

Building things that solve real problems.

mike@digitalferrari.com

MikeFerrari