Mike Glaz — Resume

Summary

Backend software engineer (Ruby on Rails) with full-stack experience and 10+ years in the industry, including 6 years operating Pluralsight's Cloud Labs platform — an event-driven, GraphQL-federated microservices system spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP that provisions, grades, and tears down real cloud environments for students at scale. A long-tenured contributor to both the platform's core Ruby/Rails backend services and its React/TypeScript admin dashboard. Track record of driving cross-service technical work — identity-model consolidation, abuse-detection systems, and security remediation — end-to-end.

Technical Skills

Languages/Frameworks: Ruby, Rails, GraphQL, React, JavaScript, TypeScript
Cloud/Infra: Azure (ARM templates, Azure Resource Manager, Azure AD/Graph API), AWS (Organizations, IAM — account-provisioning automation), GCP (IAM/service accounts) — hands-on infrastructure work; working familiarity with additional AWS/Azure/GCP platform services used elsewhere in the same system
Architecture: Event-driven microservices, GraphQL federation (subgraph integration into a shared Apollo Router supergraph), state-machine-driven service orchestration
AI Tooling: Claude Code (CLI + VS Code extension), MCP servers (GitLab, Jira, Snyk, New Relic, semantic code search via ChromaDB), custom Claude Code skills
Data/Background Processing: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, DynamoDB, Algolia
Practices/Tooling: RSpec + VCR, Jest, React Testing Library, RuboCop, Snyk (CVE remediation), Git, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, JIRA, Agile/Scrum

Experience

Software Engineer — Pluralsight Westlake, TX (Remote) | Nov 2020 – Present

Backend engineer on the Cloud Labs platform team, working across the full lab lifecycle — provisioning, grading, templating, and abuse prevention — for real, ephemeral AWS/Azure/GCP environments that students provision, work in, and get graded on.

Drove a cross-service migration off Auth0/AuthEngine onto Pluralsight's internal session identity — collapsing dual authentication code paths, retiring the legacy AuthEngine client, and removing deprecated identifiers across 8+ services.
Built and extended production abuse/fraud-detection systems across Azure and GCP — resource-abuse auto-remediation, a tenant-wide Azure AD "Security Defaults" auto-enforcement worker, and a bidirectional ban-status integration with the platform's system-of-record.
Mentored a team new to Ruby on Rails through building a new AWS account-provisioning service from scratch, personally contributing its async, Sidekiq-based account-creation pipeline.
Extended the platform's lab-grading library with new assertion types and cross-service SSH/VM-based grading support; separately built GCP service-account provisioning end-to-end, migrated a legacy gRPC client to REST, and added a permanent image-linking system so lab-guide assets never break.
Maintained and extended the platform's React/TypeScript admin dashboard — shipping features across ~10 admin areas.
Built a read-only Redis key browser and CLI tool for the admin dashboard, including resolving a real taint-analysis security finding in the key-validation logic with a well-reasoned, non-paranoid fix.
Volunteered to move to the React frontend team for a year (Aug 2022 – Sep 2023), shipping features in the lab-authoring tool, the laas-admin tool, and the student-facing hands-on labs and sandbox sites.
Built a self-service sandbox-extension feature end-to-end — a frontend countdown modal backed by a service that reschedules the real teardown across AWS, Azure, and GCP, enforced server-side as a one-time grace period.

Software Application Developer — Tukaiz Franklin Park, IL | Mar 2014 – Mar 2018

Migrated the company's monolithic Rails backend from Rails 2.2 to Rails 4 and Angularized the frontend; built a shipping-quote/fee-calculator integration with the FedEx and UPS APIs for cart checkout.

Web Developer — Freelance Chicagoland | Aug 2009 – Mar 2014

Built and maintained personal and small-business websites (LAMP, then Ruby on Rails), including custom auth/authorization, PayPal checkout, mailing-list subscriptions, and forum/messaging features.

Web Developer (Contract) — Harper College Palatine, IL | Mar 2009 – Aug 2009

Redesigned the college library's website (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and rebuilt form validation using JavaScript and regular expressions.

Senior Programmer — Accenture Austin, TX | Nov 2002 – Jul 2006

Modernized a legacy Medicaid claims data-delivery system for the State of Texas using C, migrating transmission from tape/mail to FTP.

Summary

Technical Skills

Experience

Education