Michael Johnson

Rebuilt the client-facing web application front end in React and TypeScript, improving first contentful paint by 42% and increasing trial-to-paid conversion by 11%. Integrated a third-party AI/ML document summarization service with robust retry/rate-limit handling and a queue-backed fallback so vendor outages never block users, including keeping the feature live through multiple vendor incidents. Designed the REST API layer and PostgreSQL schema behind a scheduling module supporting ~3,200 daily active users at p95 latency under 180 ms. Led migration of the deployment pipeline to Docker and GitHub Actions, reducing releases from monthly manual pushes to weekly automated deploys with rollback in under five minutes. Hardened authentication and authorization with OAuth 2.0 and role-based access, addressing findings from an external security review before enterprise launch. Mentored developers and set testing standards using Jest and Playwright.

Built and maintained a high-traffic content platform on Node.js and MongoDB, supporting 1.4 million monthly visitors. Improved search relevance using Elasticsearch indexing and query tuning, increasing click-through on search results by 27%. Delivered responsive React interfaces for editorial and client teams. Automated content ingestion from partner APIs, removing a weekly manual process that consumed six editorial hours. Reduced infrastructure costs by 19% through AWS right-sizing and application-layer caching. Added Python batch jobs for daily analytics rollups, replacing a two-day manual assembly process. Implemented integration tests around publishing workflows, reducing production content bugs by ~60% over two quarters.

Developed the web application for online ticket sales and seat selection, processing 40,000 transactions per season without failed show nights. Integrated payment gateway APIs with idempotent handling to eliminate duplicate charges. Migrated box office reporting from spreadsheets to a MySQL-backed admin tool, saving staff about five hours per week. Built JavaScript and jQuery reserved seating flows validated against real customer browsers. Coordinated releases around performance nights to avoid disruption, set up automated backups and monitoring to reduce recovery time from a full day to under an hour after disk failure, and documented the system for seasonal staff. Refactored legacy PHP endpoints into a cleaner service layer to speed future feature delivery.