Michael Erfman

About

Backend/data platform engineer who owned an enterprise Django REST + PostgreSQL reporting backend and built Python ETL pipelines to normalize 3M+ legacy customer records, improving data reliability by 85%. Strong Kubernetes/GitOps practitioner (Helm, ArgoCD, Jenkins/GitHub Actions) with real-world production debugging experience, plus Kafka streaming at 5M events/day and a zero-downtime monolith-to-event-driven microservices migration on AWS that cut infra costs by 42%.

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Owned Django REST/PostgreSQL backend for enterprise reporting platform
• Built Python ETL pipelines processing 3M+ customer records from legacy systems
• Improved data reliability by 85% via validation, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and idempotent loads
• Kubernetes production deployments with Helm + GitOps (ArgoCD) and CI/CD (Jenkins/GitHub Actions)
• Diagnosed and fixed production readiness probe failures using init containers and tuned probes; added pre-promotion load checks
• Led phased migration from legacy monolith to event-driven microservices on AWS with feature flags and parallel data pipelines
• Enabled zero-downtime migration using Kafka messaging and gradual traffic shifting; reduced AWS costs 42% annually
• Built Kafka streaming pipeline processing 5M events/day with partitioning, DLQs, schema validation, and idempotent consumers
• Delivered sub-second analytics with consistent ClickHouse ingestion under bursty traffic