Mike Arpaia

About Me

I’m a computer scientist currently working at Moonfire Ventures. Moonfire is an early-stage venture capital firm which aims to be the most compelling and best performing early-stage firm in Europe by using data, technology, and machine learning to drive the entire investment lifecycle. Previously, I was the Co-Founder and CTO of Kolide, an infrastructure analytics startup where I built and led a completely remote engineering organization and raised 9.6 million dollars in venture funding. I’ve also worked in engineering and machine learning leadership roles at Facebook, Etsy, and Workday.

A passionate open source leader and contributor, I created and open-sourced osquery while working at Facebook in 2014. Osquery has since become a foundational tool in the information security and monitoring industries. Osquery is now an industry standard when it comes to securing infrastructure and is actively used by thousands of companies all over the world to detect and respond to security threats, data breaches, and other critical incidents.

In addition to my work at Workday which focused on large-scale deep learning for natural language, I’ve also worked as a Research Engineer at Mila, a leading academic deep learning lab, on a project which combines state of the art deep learning for computer vision and climate science to make an impact in the battle against climate change. Mila is recognized globally within the academic community for it’s significant contributions to the field of deep learning and has distinguished itself in the areas of language modelling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models.

An experienced distributed systems engineer and a seasoned Kubernetes administrator and developer, I’ve been using Kubernetes in production since 2016. I was also a member of the Kubernetes core contributor team from 2018 until 2021 where I served on the Release Team for four releases as well as participated in several Working Groups and Special Interest Groups. I led my team at Kolide to build and operate what was one of the largest Kubernetes clusters in Google Cloud’s GKE at the time and built cutting-edge autonomous infrastructure management software to operate and scale our clusters.

In addition to my professional and academic interests, I’m also excited about the outdoors, fitness, nutrition, and exercise science. I like to train for and participate in a variety of combat and mountain sports including Muay Thai, rock climbing, and skiing. I also play the electric and upright bass. The bass fulfils an extremely foundational role in the rhythmic structure of music and that has always drawn me to the instrument.

Professional Experience

Partner

Moonfire Ventures

November 2020 – Present London, UK

At Moonfire, I’m responsible for the definition and delivery of the firm’s technology strategy. The majority of my time is spent architecting and engineering our software, sourcing and processing massive datasets, and developing machine learning solutions which allow Moonfire to leverage this data to make successful investments. The remainder of my time includes more traditional investment partner responsibilities such as contributing to the management of the investment lifecycle, sourcing and evaluating investment prospects, and advising portfolio companies.

Machine Learning Architect

Workday

April 2020 – November 2020 London, UK

After helping to build, launch, and scale a distributed embedding-based search and recommendation system, I was promoted to Architect (Workday’s Director-level IC role) and my responsibilities shifted to emphasize explicit focus on establishing and unifying the architecture and strategy for wider data science and engineering initiatives in an effort to optimize for the velocity and rigor of methodological inquiry as well as the long-term scalability and stability of the platform across all research and engineering groups.

Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Workday

March 2019 – April 2020 Boulder, CO

At Workday, I joined the Machine Learning organization to lead the architecture, implementation, and productionalization of a distributed embedding-based search and multi-document matching engine. I led the design and delivery of several different parts of the stack which we successfully launched and scaled in support of several generally available Workday products with the Recruiting, Learning, and Talent product organizations.

Co-Founder & CTO

Kolide

July 2016 – January 2019 Boulder, CO

As the Co-Founder and CTO of a small venture-backed infrastructure analytics startup, I built and led a high-performing, fully-remote engineering organization with engineers in every US timezone. I also acted as the lead architect and developer for almost all of our backend, infrastructure, and operating system software. As Co-Founder, my role also allowed me to spend time as a frequent author of blog articles, part-time salesman, periodic financial negotiator, persistent pedagogue, etc.

Engineering Manager

Facebook

October 2015 – June 2016 Menlo Park, CA

After working as an individual contributor at Facebook, I became the Engineering Manager of the intrusion detection infrastructure team. In addition to learning a lot about the technical subject matter of intrusion detection and large-scale data analytics, I learned a lot about how to be an effective people leader for a team of extremely high-performing individuals. Facebook provides a lot of great support to individual contributors that transition to engineering management and I took advantage of these resources as much as possible.

Software Engineer

Facebook

February 2014 – October 2015 Menlo Park, CA

I joined the team at Facebook to work on improving host intrusion detection capabilities, specifically on macOS and Linux which were falling behind Windows tools from vendors. To accomplish this across all of Facebook’s environments, I created the osquery project and widely deployed it throughout corp and production with enormous help from an amazing team. Osquery is the most starred security project on all of GitHub!

Senior Software Engineer

Etsy

July 2013 – February 2014 New York, NY

After helping to establish several aspects of Etsy’s infrastructure and application security practices, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer where I was the youngest Senior Engineer in the history of the company as well as the only engineer to have ever been an active participant in both the Engineering and Operations on-call rotations. Being passionate about data infrastructure and data analytics, I also became the designated security lead for data infrastructure and I voluntarily maintained some analytics infrastructure for our team of Data Analysts.

Software Engineer

Etsy

October 2012 – July 2013 New York, NY

While at Etsy, I was a Software Engineer on the Security team working on a wide range of engineering efforts to ensure the security of Etsy’s infrastructure and application. One of the things that I worked on was a custom host intrusion detection system which I deployed and managed across Etsy’s corporate infrastructure where I was fortunate enough to participate in several red team exercises designed to test it’s effectiveness. This effort provided a lot of experience and domain expertise that guided a lot of design decisions in osquery.

Security Engineer

iSEC Partners

August 2011 – October 2012 New York, NY

At iSEC Partners, I was a penetration tester and security researcher, specializing in infrastructure security, mobile operating system security, and mobile application security. I did research on mobile device exploitation, PHP application security, and mobile application security.

Security Engineer

Gotham Digital Science

January 2011 – August 2012 New York, NY

I did security assessments for GDS while also attending University. I participated in infrastructure and application assessments for a variety of large financial and technology companies.

Volunteer Experience

Research Engineer

Mila - Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute

May 2019 – January 2020 Montréal, QC

At Mila, I worked as a volunteer on software and infrastructure engineering objectives for a project which aimed to raise awareness and conceptual understanding of climate change by depicting accurate and personalized outcomes of climate change using cutting-edge techniques from artificial intelligence and climate modeling.

Kubernetes Contributor

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

June 2018 – January 2021

During my time working with SIG Release, I was an active member of the Kubernetes Release Team for 4 consecutive releases. Much of my work during my first few releases consisted of systematically re-architecting the release notes generation and distribution process from an extremely manual process to a software-powered process. During my last release, I co-lead the release alongside Aaron Crickenberger and Ben Elder. Throughout my time working with SIG Release, I learned a lot about how Kubernetes is built and released, how features are prioritized, etc.

Passionate about multi-tenant deployment environments, I also contributed to the Multi-tenancy Working Group during it’s earliest days. I was an active participant in early architecture discussions and I contributed to early software development prototypes of a Kubernetes Custom Resource and Operator for managing multi-tenant workloads.

Open-Source Leadership

Kubernetes Release Team Member

Kubernetes Sep 2017 – Mar 2019

Kubernetes Multi-Tenancy Working Group Member

Kubernetes Sep 2017 – Dec 2018

Osquery Project Lead

Osquery Feb 2014 – Jun 2016

Osquery Project Founder

Osquery Feb 2014

Conference Talks

Using a Kubernetes Operator to Manage Tenancy in a B2B SaaS App

Companies that create products for other companies or teams often have to reason about how to deal with the application-level tenancy of each team. This presentation will discuss how Kolide has approached the problem of application tenancy by building a Kubernetes Operator to manage the complete lifecycle of each tenant as an isolated instance of a single-tenant application.

Dec 11, 2018 Seattle, WA

Mike Arpaia

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