Product and platform ownership
Bringing product, embedded R&D, vendors, factory systems, backend teams, and cloud architecture together to deliver a working system.
Principal Cloud Platform Engineer · St. Gallen, Switzerland
I build backend and cloud systems that stay fast, reliable, and understandable.
My focus is backend engineering with Go, AWS, Terraform, microservices, and distributed systems. I work on the production architecture, write the code, and handle the operational details.
Engineering focus
BuildGo · Node.js · Python
ScaleGlobal IoT · AWS · Distributed systems
OperatePerformance · Reliability · Security · Cost
15+ years building useful products from complex systems
Profile
A systems thinker who stays close to the code.
I started building and operating systems in my teens, then learned large-scale, low-latency engineering in Beijing. I work best across product, embedded devices, backend software, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
I joined AirVisual/IQAir in Beijing as a Senior Software Architect in 2017. After moving to Switzerland as Cloud Architect, I designed and built the global IoT foundation for new device generations. From 2021, Lead DevOps was added to my architecture remit. Today I focus on hands-on backend and platform engineering as Principal Cloud Platform Engineer.
Expertise
From product requirements to production.
Backend & distributed systems
Building and operating Go, Node.js, and Python services with clear contracts, low latency, controlled failure modes, and safe migrations.
Reliability, performance & cost
Assessing performance, reliability, scalability, security, and cost together, using measurements from live systems.
Experience
From game hosting to global IoT.
Before IQAir, I worked in hosting, operational software, and large-scale services. Across my career, I took on direct user responsibility, product engineering, scale, architecture, international coordination, and global platform ownership.
Hands-on principal engineering
Principal Cloud Platform Engineer
Design and modernize backend and cloud-native platforms across global services, covering infrastructure, performance investigations, security, developer tooling, and production problems.
Lead DevOps mandate added from 2021
Cloud Architect
Owned cloud, backend, and IoT architecture and worked with product and R&D on technology direction. Coordinated international teams and vendors, advised on technical risk, security, reliability, cost, and production readiness, and mentored engineers while continuing to build and operate systems.
Architecture, backend, and engineering practices
Senior Software Architect
Built and operated air-quality services and supported the move from on-premises infrastructure to AWS. Introduced code review, TDD, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, database indexing, and observability practices.
High-scale advertising, WiFi, and analytics systems
Senior Full Stack Developer
Developed experience at scale through low-latency DSP/DMP/SSP services, APIs, and captive portals used across major retail deployments. The role combined deployment automation and Nginx load balancing across hundreds of commodity servers with technical leadership in a small team.
Commerce and operational software
C#.NET Main Developer
Built a localized e-commerce CMS, payment and CRM integrations, and Windows Mobile barcode applications. Developed database structures, security controls, documentation, and multi-region release processes.
Started building in my teens
Software, systems & hosting
Ran and extended an online-game hosting operation. Later work covered Linux administration and hardening, PHP/.NET, SharePoint, ASP.NET, Android, MySQL, Apache, synchronization tooling, automation, and user support.
Selected work
Systems I built and operated.
These representative, non-confidential summaries describe the engineering decisions, my scope of responsibility, and the production outcomes.
01 · Flagship system · Global IoT platform
Global IoT connectivity, from factory provisioning to production.
I designed and implemented the platform that allowed new IQAir device generations to bootstrap securely, connect to the closest regional broker, and integrate with the existing AirVisual backend ecosystem.
01Device & factory
Registration, provisioning, firmware identity
02Bootstrap service
Trust, configuration, nearest-region routing
03Regional IoT brokers
Active/active MQTT connectivity worldwide
04Backend ecosystem
Telemetry, control, data, and existing services
System decisions
- Defined device connectivity specifications, MQTT topic structure, telemetry contracts, bootstrap behavior, and regional routing.
- Designed active/active global connectivity while preserving compatibility with the existing device and backend platform.
- Created factory registration and provisioning flows, including the device key material accepted by the cloud trust chain.
End-to-end ownership
- Aligned external embedded and PCB vendors, internal R&D, product, factory, backend, and cloud stakeholders.
- Wrote the specifications and implemented core cloud, backend, and factory components.
- Took the system into production, with operability, security, reliability, scalability, and cost addressed in the design.
02
Backend performance & migration
Reducing a production footprint from 64 servers to 2
Rewrote a major device API from Node.js to Go and migrated it incrementally without breaking compatibility. In a separate project, I streamed database changes into Redis for a nearest-station service, reducing lookup time from seconds to microseconds.
03
Reliability, observability & FinOps
Tracing production issues and controlling cloud spend
Introduced infrastructure as code, CI/CD, tracing, structured logging, alerting, error tracking, service dashboards, autoscaling, and scheduled scaling. Built the first integrations and patterns and handled MongoDB and traffic incidents, using that operational evidence to improve reliability and cost.
04
Distributed systems on commodity infrastructure
Building distributed systems across hundreds of servers
At Goyoo, I built high-scale advertising, WiFi, social, and analytics systems on commodity infrastructure. The work included developing a router API and captive-portal ecosystem used in KFC and Pizza Hut locations in China, with WeChat and Weibo login integrations.
05
Technical leadership
Turning business goals into production systems
Worked with product and engineering on technology strategy, R&D direction, and architecture to turn broad business goals into systems teams could implement and operate. Responsibilities included technical risk, mentoring, vendor evaluation, code review, and production readiness.
Recommendations
What colleagues say.
Feedback from engineers and technical leaders I've worked with on architecture, platform engineering, DevOps, and production systems.
I've had the pleasure of working with Michaël since 2017, and over the years he has become the engineer everyone turns to for difficult architectural decisions, complex production issues, and guidance on the technical direction of our platform. His expertise spans backend development, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, DevOps, observability, and databases, but what sets him apart is his ability to connect technical details with the bigger picture. His decisions are thoughtful and pragmatic, balancing performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, and business needs.
For almost 10 years, working with Michaël, I have always been impressed by the depth of his technical knowledge and his passion for complex software and cloud architecture. With his expertise, he helped us run a major multi-million-user platform smoothly and ensured the continuous growth of our ecosystem with great success!
Michael is a strong technical leader with a deep architectural understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, scalability, and operational reliability. He has the ability to look at complex systems from both a technical and business perspective, and he consistently brings clarity when teams need to make important engineering decisions.
One of the things I appreciated most about working with Michael was how he approached every problem like a true engineer. He never rushed to a solution. Instead, he took the time to understand the problem in depth, ask the right questions, and make sure we were solving the actual issue rather than just treating the symptoms.
AI-assisted engineering
Building applications with AI agents.
I'm developing a framework to make application development with AI agents faster and reproducible. Constraints, specifications, decisions, interfaces, and acceptance criteria live in versioned Markdown, shared by the agent and the team. Implementation follows bounded, reviewable milestone plans, each with a self-contained prompt, explicit scope, and a verifiable definition of done.
Verification uses repeatable builds, tests, agent review gates, and fresh-context checks. Another engineer or agent should be able to reproduce and question the results, then continue without hidden conversational context.
This portfolio is one example of my AI-assisted development work.
Current tools
Technical range
Deepest where systems meet production.
Backend engineering, AWS, and infrastructure as code are where I have the most depth. Production experience, prior work, and exposure to other cloud platforms are labelled separately below.
Primary
Languages & distributed systems
- Go
- Node.js
- Python
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Bash
- SQL
- REST
- gRPC
- MQTT
- Microservices
- Event-driven systems
- API design
- Service templates
Production experience
AWS, infrastructure & delivery
- AWS
- ECS / Fargate
- Lambda
- CloudFront
- Route 53
- ALB / NLB
- VPC
- IAM
- AWS IoT
- S3
- SQS / SNS
- Kinesis
- WAF / Shield
- Terraform
- CloudFormation
- AWS CDK
- Serverless Framework
- Docker
- Bitbucket Pipelines
- CI/CD
- Git
- Trunk-based development
- Git Flow
Production experience
Data, search & messaging
- MongoDB Atlas
- DocumentDB
- DynamoDB
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Cassandra
- Redis
- Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
- RabbitMQ
Production experience
Reliability, security & FinOps
- CloudWatch
- X-Ray
- Sentry
- Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- Structured logging
- Alerting
- Autoscaling
- Cost allocation
- Incident analysis
- Least privilege
- IAM Identity Center
- OIDC / OAuth 2.0
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Access patterns
- Linux hardening
Prior experience
Product & application stack
- C# / .NET
- WPF
- WCF
- ASP.NET MVC / WebAPI
- React
- PHP
- C / C++
- SharePoint
- Android
- Nginx
- Apache
Exposure
Other cloud platforms
- Azure
- GCP
Best role fit
Staff / Principal Platform Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer · GoCloud Infrastructure / SREIoT Platform Architect
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