Last Updated: November 2024
Mission
Self-driven, pragmatic, quality-focused software engineer with 20+ years of hands-on experience building distributed systems, extensible platforms, and productivity applications. Seeking opportunities to collaborate with a great team that aspires to make the world better.
Work History
Zipline
Staff Software Engineer
May 2022 - Present
Tech lead for the Fleet Services team, responsible for orchestrating Zipline's fleet of Platfrom 2 drones.
  • Architected Zipline's "Platform 2" (P2) fleet management strategy at a business/concept level. Worked cross-functionally to define fleet scheduling primitives, drone-dock relationships, core mission structure, and other fundemental concepts.
  • Organized critical projects spanning the software organization, including the first end-to-end integration effort connecting a customer order to drone takeoff software.
  • Directly implemented multiple systems critical to Zipline's P2 operations: Fleet state tracking in the cloud; an integration testing platform for testing business-level scenarios across company-wide cloud services and drone hardware; tooling to deeply examine the execution status of all fleet cloud software.
  • Mentored numerous software engineers across the Zipline organization.
GRAIL
Senior Staff Software Engineer & Manager
Jan 2017 - Oct 2021
Early and long-term member of GRAIL's engineering staff.
  • Core Team Lead for the commercialization effort of GRAIL's GALLERI multi-cancer screening test: Receive a test order, verify patient details, manage the test lifecycle, produce the test report, and deliver the report to physicians and patients. Designed the high-level architecture, prototyped early versions, organized a team of 20+ engineers, implemented key platform components, reported progress to leadership.
  • Directly managed a team of eight engineers, forming the core of the GALLERI commercialization effort.
  • Tech lead for lab automation team. Designed and led the implementation of the lab workflow management system, which scheduled work across automated lab instruments and human operators to execute GRAIL's core assays. "An operating system for the lab"
  • Transformed GRAIL's engineering interviewing practices to ensure a strong, consistent interview signal while simultaneously delivering a positive candidate experience.
  • Delivered fun tech talks: "Baking at GRAIL" (What is software engineering?) for the non-engineering contingent at GRAIL; a satirical "Blockchain for GRAIL Storage Infrastructure."; a biographical "The Making of a Treaster".
Dropbox
Software Engineer
Dec 2015 - Dec 2016
Member of the Devtools/Build Infrastructure team, responsible for maintaining a continuous integration system used by all of Dropbox engineering.
PDFAgent
Co-Founder
Apr 2013 - Apr 2014
Built a web-based service to help realtors manage and organize transaction documents.
Google
Senior Software Engineer
Sep 2005 - Apr 2013
Designed, implemented, deployed, documented, maintained, and supported a variety of mission-critical productivity tools and services, used by engineers across Google.
  • Deleted Internets - Built a service for monitoring data on a distributed filesystem and deleting files at appropriate times using a policy specification language. Used by teams ranging from Search, Ads, GMail, Maps, and YouTube, deleting petabytes of data per day with hundreds of service instances company-wide. In 2021, was invited back to give a talk at Google to discuss how it's been such an enduring service. (Still in use last I heard, well over 1000+ instances company-wide)
Education
Urbana-Champaign, IL
Selected Personal Projects
Griddle A web-based, one-a-day word game. Place tiles to build words on the grid, trying to score the most points. Compare scores and solutions on a global leaderboard.
Incant Yet another static site generator, similar to Hugo or Zola. It aims to be less opinionated, more flexible and customizable.
HexImperium A web-based, multiplayer, turn-based strategy conquer-the-[hex]world game with AI opponents.
Treader A web-based multi-user RSS reader service.
Ruin Quest A web-based multi-user adventure game.
Bitlobber A simple web service for transferring data to/from untrusted computers without entering credentials (which could be keylogged), and without inserting USB keys (which could be infected).
Words Unshuffle A web-based multiplayer Boggle-like game.
See more projects at bleatentooten.com/projects.
Patents
Dutta, Shona and Treaster, Michael. 2015. Power modes of computing devices. US 9078208 B1, filed March 27, 2012, and issued July 7, 2015
Essays
Various essays on software engineering and other topics. https://bleatentooten.com/essays, 2024.
(this site is still a bit WIP, don't mock it too soundly :-) )
Publications
Michael Treaster, William Conner, Indranil Gupta, Klara Nahrstedt. "ContagAlert: Using Contagion Theory for Adaptive, Distributed Alert Propagation". IEEE Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2006.
Gregory A. Koenig, Adam J. Lee, Michael Treaster, Nadir Kiyanclar, and William Yurcik. "Cluster Security with NVisionCC: Process Monitoring by Leveraging Emergent Properties". In Workshop for Cluster Security (Cluster-sec), 2005.
Xiaoxin Yin, William Yurcik, Michael Treaster, Yifan Li, and Kiran Lakkaraju. "VisFlowConnect: NetFlows Visualizations of Link Relationships for Security Situational Awareness". CCS Workshop on Visualization and Data Mining for Computer Security (VizSEC/DMSEC), 2004.
Michael Treaster. "A Survey of Fault-Tolerance and Fault-Recovery Techniques in Parallel Systems". ACM Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 2005.
Michael Treaster. "A Survey of Distributed Intrusion Detection Approaches". ACM Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 2005.
Michael Treaster, Nadir Kiyanclar, Gregory A. Koenig, and William Yurcik. "A Distributed Economics-based Infrastructure for Utility Computing". ACM Computing Research Repository (CoRR), 2005.
Practiced Buzzwords
Go Python Javascript C++
AWS Docker Kubernetes Kafka
Drone Orchestration Laboratory Automation Distributed Systems Platform Design