Michael Covello

Email: covelloz.michael@gmail.com
Website: covelloz.info

Principal Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience building web applications, APIs, and data pipelines at enterprise scale. Foundational background in applied mathematics drives a rigorous approach to system design, data and API architecture, and performance engineering.

Professional Experience

• Campspot — Principal Software Engineer (Oct 2019 to Present)
  Frontend: Angular, NextJS/React, Typescript
  Backend: Java, Kotlin, Go
  • Built the online booking Angular web application from ground zero; now serves 5-10k daily reservations and 2–4M daily requests across availability search, map discovery, ratings & reviews, user accounts, user analytics, secure payments, and third-party integrations
  • Led backend performance and stability engineering, cutting p95 search latency from 10–15s to under 2s via request batching, concurrency tuning, smart caching, and SQL optimizations, eliminating recurring scaling incidents and reducing resource costs
  • Designed and directed backend security efforts including an ABAC authorization system for the B2B API and a multi-layered fraud prevention system that stopped carding attacks and minimized payment fraud
• SpaceX — Data Engineer II (Oct 2016 to Aug 2019)
  Frontend: React, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, D3.js, Matplotlib, Tableau
  Backend: Python, SQL
  • Built and maintained a suite of data engineering tools & applications supporting Falcon 9 and Dragon supply chain operations including data warehouses & ETL pipelines, ML predictive models, data-driven interactive dashboards, and custom-built web applications
  • Saved thousands of manual labor hours and reduced human error through automated review of purchase-order requirements, in-house fabrication timetables, and critical-path analysis ensuring schedule risk & delay-to-launch were minimized
• Randa Accessories — Data Engineer (Feb 2015 to Oct 2016)
  Frontend: Excel, HTML/CSS, PyQt
  Backend: Python, VBA, SQL
  • Built Python & VBA automation scripts processing millions of rows of relational data and raw unstructured files, delivering automated reporting to material planning teams
  • Engineered internal GUI desktop applications in Python enabling non-technical supply chain teams to generate time-sensitive operational reports on demand, eliminating human error and bottlenecks
• University of Iowa — Mathematics Teaching Assistant (Aug 2011 to Dec 2014)
  • Instructed and mentored ~50 students across two calculus and pre-calculus courses per semester, delivering weekly lectures, evaluating coursework, and providing individualized academic support

Technology Experience

• Backend languages — Kotlin, Java, Go
• Frontend languages — JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS/SCSS
• Scripting languages — Python, Lua, VBA, Bash
• Frontend frameworks — Angular/RxJS, React/NextJS, Tailwind CSS
• SEO — server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG)
• Databases — MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres, DynamoDB
• Web servers & frameworks — Dropwizard, Quarkus, Ktor, Flask, Fiber, Node, Nginx
• Containerization — Docker, Kubernetes, Podman
• Scaling & serverless — AWS ECS/EKS, AWS Lambda
• Continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD) — AWS, ArgoCD, Bamboo, Buildkite, Harness
• Monitoring & alerts — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, LogRocket, AWS CloudWatch, Graylog
• Testing — JUnit, Kotest (property-based), WireMock, Playwright
• API documentation — OpenAPI spec, Redocly, Docusaurus
• Authentication — secure cookies & sessions, JWTs, AWS Cognito, OAuth 2.0, 2FA/MFA
• Authorization — AWS API Gateway, access control (RBAC, ABAC)
• Security & bot detection — reCAPTCHA, device and TLS fingerprinting, AWS WAF
• Hashing & encryption — HMAC/SHA-256, MD5 checksums, AES, RSA
• Caching and memoization — Redis, LRU, Guava, IndexedDB
• Data mining unstructured data — regex, Beautiful Soup (web scraping)
• Statistical and machine learning models — regression, random forest, and cosine similarity
• Graph optimization — coloring & backtracking algorithms
• Interactive data visualization — D3.js, Charts.js, Plotly/Dash, Bokeh, Looker, and Tableau

Education

• MS, Mathematics
  University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
  Coursework focused on applied mathematics and computational sciences
• BS, Mathematics
  Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
• BA, Economics
  Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, IL