Mike Arpaia

Machine Learning Engineer

Workday

About Me

I’m a computer scientist interested in machine learning, distributed systems, and pure mathematics. I enjoy researching deep learning approaches to vision and language problems as well as building large-scale production systems that use these neural networks to accomplish interesting objectives. Professionally, I’m a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Workday. Academically, I’m a student at the University of Colorado Boulder where I’m pursuing a degree in Mathematics.

In the past, I’ve worked as a Software Engineer at Facebook and Etsy. I was also the Co-Founder and CTO of an infrastructure analytics company where I built a completely remote engineering organization and raised 9.6 million dollars in venture funding.

While working at Facebook in 2014, I created and open-sourced a tool called osquery which exposes a SQL interface to a fleet of computers for fast, flexible operating system monitoring. Osquery has since become a foundational tool in the information security and compliance industries.

Outside of work, I’m an avid outdoors enthusiast. I like to train for and participate in a variety of mountain sports including rock climbing, skiing, and adventure motorcycling. I also play the electric and upright bass. The bass fulfills an extremely foundational role in the rhythmic structure of music and that has always drawn me to the instrument.

Interests

Artificial Neural Networks
Neurobiology
Generative Adversarial Networks
Reinforcement Learning
Neural Probabilistic Language Models
Distributed Systems
Hardware Accelerated Linear Algebra

Education

Mathematics, 2019 - Present
University of Colorado Boulder
Computer Science, 2009 - 2011
Stevens Institute of Technology

Experience

Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Workday

March 2019 – Present Boulder, CO

At Workday, I am a member of the Human Capital Management (HCM) Machine Learning (ML) team where my work exists at the intersection of Software Engineering and Machine Learning Research. I’m currently focused on researching deep learning techniques for natural language problems, putting these techniques into practice to train increasingly effective neural probabilistic language models, and using these language models for large-scale information retrieval use-cases.

Co-Founder & CTO

Kolide

July 2016 – January 2019 Boulder, CO

As the CTO and Co-Founder of a small infrastructure analytics startup, I was the lead architect and developer for almost all of our backend, infrastructure, and operating system software. I was also a frequent author of blog articles, part-time salesman, periodic financial negotiator, persistent pedagogue, etc. Several of Kolide’s tools for managing osquery infrastructure have been open sourced on GitHub.

Engineering Manager

Facebook

October 2015 – June 2016 Menlo Park, CA

After working on osquery as an individual contributor at Facebook, I was the Engineering Manager of the intrusion detection infrastructure team at Facebook. We were primarily responsible for host instrumentation (osquery), network instrumentation (Bro and Suricata), email detection, etc. I learned a lot about managing and supporting humans, big company dynamics, and a whole bunch of ways to detect and respond to compromise.

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

October 2012 – February 2014 Brooklyn, NY

While at Etsy, I worked on a custom host intrusion detection system which I deployed and managed across Etsy’s corporate infrastructure. I participated in several red team exercises designed to test it’s effectiveness. I gained a lot of experience and domain expertise that guided a lot of design decisions in osquery.

At Etsy, I was also the designated security lead for data infrastructure and voluntarily maintained some analytics infrastructure for our team of Data Analysts.

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.

Network Technician

Stevens Institute of Technology

June 2010 – January 2011 Hoboken, NJ

During university, I worked as a Network Technician for the Stevens IT department where I performed a variety of maintenance, debugging, and repair tasks on networking equipment all throughout the campus.