Michael Haddon
Senior Software Engineer / Go, Platform & Infrastructure / Kubernetes
Jersey, Channel Islands
Profile
I've worked in software and infrastructure professionally for over fifteen years, and for most of the last decade I've built and run production platforms, much of that in Go and latterly through my own studio, PolitePixels. Along the way I've kept a fintech's platform at 99.9% uptime, owned the logistics platform behind the Dutch national ports and cut a client's cloud spend by 65%.
What I enjoy most is the layer beneath the layer: the infrastructure, platforms and developer tooling that let a team get on with their product while the hard parts hold. It's why I build my own tools, including Piko, a single-binary Go web framework. I'm as comfortable in the Kubernetes ecosystem as in the Go services running on it.
At real scale that has meant data platforms (Kafka, Spark and Cassandra for Audi, a financial-data lakehouse for a pensions client) and keeping systems a country depends on alive. That operational experience now informs my work on languages, runtimes and developer tools.
Toolkit
Experience
Founder & Principal Engineer
- The studio my wife and I run (earlier Haddon Consultancy in the Netherlands): Go software and the infrastructure under it for 10+ companies across fintech, logistics, legal, SaaS and manufacturing in NL, Jersey, Germany and the US, much of it running on Piko
- Ran the business end to end, from architecture and delivery through to proposals and client relationships
- Cut a client's cloud spend by 65% through rightsizing, removing idle workloads and smarter resource and configuration management, without hurting reliability
- Migrated 5TB of a 200-year-old law firm's archive off a legacy system to the cloud with bespoke Go tooling, rebuilding and reconciling every document individually with byte-exact validation, because a lost or altered legal document is inadmissible in court
- Managed the Kubernetes, big-data and cloud infrastructure (AWS and GCP) for a Dutch fintech, a Dutch logistics company and a US SaaS company
- Shipped production websites and internal operations tooling, and prototyped performance-sensitive PoCs in C and Go for a German startup
TechAWS, Bare metal, BigQuery, C, GCP, GitOps, Go, Kafka, Kubernetes, Parquet, Tailscale, Terraform
RemitArchitecture Design, Engineering, On-call Support
Senior Infrastructure Consultant (via PolitePixels & Haddon Consultancy)
- A pensions-sector client; built an outbound data lakehouse that consolidated and cross-referenced financial-modelling data, on AWS Lake Formation with Parquet in object storage, queried through Athena and Spark SQL (Apache Kyuubi)
- Built a golden path for developers by standardising Helm charts and FluxCD GitOps pipelines, enabling developer self-service and reducing deployment friction
- Drove Operational Readiness for go-live: led the readiness investigations and authored the documentation that cleared the programme for production and handed it to the internal team
- Cut project vulnerabilities from thousands to a low residual count, while keeping new releases at the standard required for production
TechApache Kyuubi (Spark SQL), AWS Athena, AWS Lake Formation, FluxCD (GitOps), Kubernetes, Parquet, Spark, Terraform
RemitEngineering, Operational Readiness
Lead Infrastructure Engineer
- A fintech startup; re-engineered the platform from scratch on open-source GitOps, service meshes and Kubernetes (GKE), a remit scoped for three engineers that I delivered solo
- Built continuous load-testing to hold stability through traffic spikes
- Led a complete platform overhaul after being recruited to fix reliability targets that lagged product growth, holding 99.9% availability through a sharp rise in concurrent usage
TechAWS, GCP, GitOps, Istio, Kubernetes, Terraform
RemitArchitecture Design, Engineering, On-call Support, Operational Maturity
Senior DevOps Engineer
- Owned the core logistics platform for the Dutch national ports on AWS, a nationally critical system where downtime would halt cargo across every Dutch port
- Drove the organisation's cloud-native adoption across its many teams and stakeholders, introducing Kubernetes, service meshes and GitOps into the core ports platform
- Worked on the team's reliability initiative (SLOs, observability) that cut incidents from daily to once every few months, after a challenging move from third-party-managed to self-managed AWS
TechAWS, AWS Lambda, Istio, Java, Kubernetes, Oracle, Terraform
RemitArchitecture Design, Engineering, On-call Support, Operational Maturity
Site Reliability / Infrastructure Engineer (via Lunatech Labs)
- A leading German automotive client; ran the vehicle-telemetry data platform that ingested data from the fleet over MQTT, streamed it through Kafka, processed it with Spark (Scala) and stored it in Cassandra
- Operated the platform across 400+ AWS EC2 instances and 15 clusters on Mesos / DC/OS and Kubernetes, with CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins and automated nightly build testing
- Simplified the CI/CD system, ran a Kubernetes training programme that got new engineers productive in days rather than weeks, mentored 5+ engineers and was the primary technical liaison for a US-based R&D partner, then handed the platform to the internal team at go-live
TechAnsible, AWS, Cassandra (Datastax), DC/OS, Docker, Java, Jenkins, Kafka, Kubernetes, Mesos, MQTT, Scala, Spark, UCR
RemitEngineering, On-call Support, Client Engagement, Training
Full-Stack Developer
- Built core services for an international gambling startup
- Led the JavaScript frontend rewrite from ES5 to ES6, setting the patterns the rest of the team built against
- Cut the time to spin up a test environment from weeks to minutes
TechApache, Java, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, PHP, Puppet, SCSS, Vagrant, Virtual Machines
RemitEngineering
Systems Administrator & Technical Support
- Maintained the IT infrastructure of 30+ local companies across hospitality and finance
TechLinux, Sophos, Virtual Machines, VMware, Windows, Windows Server
RemitOn-call Support, Client Engagement
Website Development
- Built bespoke websites with integrated content management systems for local clients
TechApache, AWS EC2, CSS, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, Nginx, PHP, Virtual Machines
RemitClient Engagement, Engineering, On-call Support, Product Management
Open source
Piko
- Designed and maintain a single-binary Go web framework: server-side rendering and single-file components, no separate build pipeline.
- Built the whole toolchain end to end: parser, dev server, and a native PDF engine.
- Quietly powers the client systems I've delivered, and renders this very site and this CV.
TechGo, SSR, Web Components
Pipit
- Built a from-source interpreter for Go: run Go like a scripting language with no compile step.
- Powers Piko's hot-reload, giving a fast edit-and-refresh loop without recompiling.
TechGo, interpreter
cockroachdb/apd
- The arbitrary-precision decimal library CockroachDB uses, and the one Piko's money handling is built on.
- Fixed a negative zero bug in the library's big-integer arithmetic: multiplying, dividing or taking the remainder to zero with a negative operand produced a zero that compared as negative. Merged upstream in March 2026.
TechGo, decimal arithmetic