As an Executive Leadership Team member at Top Hat, I work to ensure that the Engineering team is aligned to business priorities, delivering towards our roadmap and ensuring that we can continue to attract and retain top performers for the organisation.

Over the last year, we were concerned about our lack of visibility into teamwork, and we shifted from ShapeUp to Agile/Scrum. Truly changing our mindset and approach required bringing on an Agile leader. We have leveraged approaches like Flight Levels to understand team operations better, manage work in progress, and build high-performing teams.

As Top Hat has acquired four publishers and continues to evaluate acquisition opportunities to bolster our product offering, I’ve been involved in the different facets of the M&A process. I have helped during the diligence phase to ensure that we understand the value of the opportunity through planning the integration itself. We have successfully unified content, platforms, and teams and consis

Top Hat is an education technology company in Toronto, Canada, focused on tackling student engagement. Our mission is to bring instructors and students closer together, improving education. Founded in 2009, Top Hat has raised over USD 234M and has grown to over 400 people.

Aligned Top Hat around the needs of the Engineering team to shift from a monolith to a services-driven architecture to help scale and ensure we can deliver the most responsive experience to our educators and students. This initiative is a 24-month-long commitment requiring 35% of the Engineering team to be focused on the migration.

Globalive Technology was an artificial intelligence and machine learning software solution company. They were also investors in Flexiti Financial, Canada's leading provider of point-of-sale (POS) buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) consumer financing solutions for retailers. In 2020, Flexiti was recognised by the Globe and Mail as one of Canada's Fastest-Growing Companies (ranked 6th).

At Flexiti, I was a vital team member responsible for ingesting a $250M private label credit card portfolio on an ambitious timeline. This involved bridging the gap between the product team in Toronto and the development team in Argentina - ensuring both sides were aware of challenges and charting a course of action.

Post ingestion, I worked closely with the CEO and VP of Change Management to ensure that new customers could be onboarded quickly to the Flexiti network - a key accomplishment was ensuring that Wayfair's needs would be met and utilised Flexiti to back the Wayfair Credit Card.

big river technologies is a near-shoring firm, located in Eastern Ontario, focusing on bringing world-class talent to bear for clients worldwide; brought in to oversee establishing and growing teams that needed a solid foundation in new technologies

· Helped to scale up the engineering team; mentored and acted as a subject matter expert to grow skills and abilities
· Built a proof of concept React Native application to demonstrate to a banking client how their existing React codebase could be extended/reused as well as demonstrating potential performance improvements for complex rendering scenarios
· Lead a team in taking an application from wireframes to production, including choosing the frameworks, building the entire CICD pipeline, and managing team members in an agile product delivery

Points (TSX: PTS; NASDAQ: PCOM) was founded in 2000 to build a loyalty and rewards platform to power nearly 60 of the world’s largest airline, hotel, and financial services programs.

Points was an early adopter of services and decomposition but was hampered by utilising in-house frameworks to manage and deploy containers. This, coupled with the archaic build and deployment tools used, led to a significant amount of friction between engineers and the operations team and a lack of trust in production code. I presented a vision built on standards, removed all manual intervention, and led to the creation of the SRE team. These changes ensured that deployments at Points were automated, fast, validated before accepting production traffic, and supported by the development teams that owned the services.

We also rebuilt our integration engine - the hub that connected Points to all of its loyalty partners. This key system was inflexible and almost unmaintainable due to its age. We rebuilt it f

Lead two product teams (Influent: http://influent.io/; TellFinder: https://tellfinder.com/) focused on delivering visual analytics software to help domain experts easily discern and identify illegal activities in large datasets

· Unified two disparate teams with two legacy applications and technology bases into a cohesive entity with a shared approach to technology, development, and deployment

· Introduced a new architecture to migrate from a batch ingestion approach to a near real-time asynchronous pipeline that allows for consuming data sets at the enterprise level

Senior member of a team working on the DIA’s Innovation Gateway – “an initiative to rapidly field disruptive technologies and lower the barrier to entry for innovators”

· Brought on board to address architectural issues with an overly-complicated microservices-based approach; simplified and collapsed where possible, added better orchestration overall

· Provided guidance to team members as to best practices when developing single page webapps, REST services design, and reduced technical debt

Atendy was an event technology platform focusing on enterprise events and professional networking. Founded with the idea that meetups and events were an untapped social network, Atendy empowered event hosts to quickly and easily build marketing sites with ticket purchases embedded directly in them. Armed with data, hosts could then understand the influencers attending the event and use them as multipliers. This vision attracted significant interest as Atendy was part of the Next Founders program.

Core team member focusing on providing feature enhancements to existing web applications while inventing a new process and framework for future initiatives.

•	Maintained and extended internal customer management and external customer facing web applications written in Struts 1 and 2; migrated from legacy versions to more recent versions to mitigate security risks; enhanced legacy Ant build system to utilize Ivy for dependency management
•	Introduced Spring framework to create new REST-based web applications; all new web applications utilize AngularJS to build scalable and responsive systems
•	Migrated from legacy Ant/CVS-based build system to modern Agile system utilizing git/gitlab, Maven, Jenkins, Nexus and Sonar; employing continuous integration and code coverage to provide visibility into possible bugs, security issues and technical debt of legacy applications

Senior Java developer tasked with enhancing existing software, providing input towards the design of new applications, and delivering standards for end-to-end software lifecycle management.

•	Given ownership of the Core framework utilized for building Java-based applications; modularized the framework to allow for better separation of concerns; instituted unit tests for refactored and new code.
•	Extended and enhanced existing Java portlet-based web application by updating existing services, adding new portlets, updating the skin and layout of the website, and incorporating jQuery and the Bootstrap framework.
•	Overhauled existing process from manual builds utilizing Ant to automated builds utilizing Maven; introduced Nexus repository management system; implemented continuous integration utilizing Microsoft Team Foundation Server; utilized Sonar to provide visibility into code coverage and metrics.
•	Mentored co-op students and team members; provided guidance and brainstorming session

Limone was a boutique consulting firm helping companies in the capital markets, health care and government arenas ensure they meet all regulatory concerns while streamlining internal processes and enhancing the overall organization's response time.

Michael Laccetti

I build things and teams and systems.