Michael Cabassol

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. TGI. A Toronto startup — the one stop on this list with nothing written up yet.
  4. 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

01

Architecture review board app built in two weeks

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
02

Keeping bookmarked pages up when another team's database failed

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
03

Replacing a $700k-a-year data catalog license

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