Resume

Michael Cabassol

Principal engineer
Contract, corp-to-corp
US · remote-first
UCBY Holdings LLC
hello@ucby.io

Principal engineer, AWS and applied AI. Leadership brings me in when a project will take a lot longer than it should. Due diligence, a build in the team’s own stack, then they run it.

Career

Serve Virtual Enterprises. I was on the account-management APIs behind every card swipe, then on the monitoring team. One .NET attribute traced every function and another cached it, at hundreds of millions of calls a day.
Express Scripts. No deployment pipeline at all: four of us built the custom Jenkins that replaced the release team’s runbooks. I argued for Kubernetes, lost to a vendor pitch, and built the on-ramp to the platform anyway.
TGI. A Toronto startup — the one stop on this list with nothing written up yet.
Cigna. The rover: leadership hands me the hardest project on whichever team is stuck. A PCF-to-AWS migration and the path to prod under it, a two-week prototype that got a two-year design effort staffed, and a forked query editor that ended a $700k-a-year renewal.

Stack

AWS (Amazon Web Services), AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS (Fargate), Application Load Balancer (ALB, ELB), Observability (Datadog, SigNoz, canonical logging), Caching (cache layers), and Cursor (AI-assisted development, Claude Code, Codex).

Depth is in the catalog below, not in a years column.

Selected work

The prototype is what got the team staffed, not two years of design review.

Two years of design meetings had produced no software. Two weeks in Cursor produced a working prototype — and the demo is what got engineers assigned to it.

Health insurance · React/Node on ECS · SQLite · in-app assistant

Design the degraded mode before the shared store you don't own goes down.

Another team's invalidation bug went straight through a cache we had already built and saturated a MongoDB we didn't own. The degraded mode we designed in kept bookmarked pages serving, and our own logs named their bug before their team was reachable.

Real estate · Lambda mid-tier · CloudFront + S3 cache · shared MongoDB

Stop renewing a vendor whose differentiating features the enterprise already owns.

A $700k-a-year renewal was on the table for features the enterprise already owned elsewhere. I forked the query editor and pointed it at the metadata on hand. In prod in two to three months; the vendor is sunsetting.

Health insurance · ~1,300 users · DBeaver fork · Collibra · Temporal

Start

This page is the summary. The catalog is the evidence.

Tell me what’s stuck