Michael Vance

Platform Engineering Lead / Indianapolis, IN

I design platforms by day and build things by weekend.

A decade in cloud-native infrastructure, a garage full of hand tools, and one conviction: whether it is a Kubernetes platform or a walnut table, the joinery is what holds it together.

Code dictates what is built; design communicates why and how it connects. MY WORKING RULE
Read the blog See the résumé
Pixel-art portrait of Michael Vance in a red flannel shirt and denim overalls with a tape measure on his belt, in front of cedar shingles.
Michael VanceTape measure: always on hand
Experience
12+ years
Developers enabled
200+
Provisioning time
4 days to 15 min
Team led
8 engineers
SEC. 01

About

I am a pragmatic, forward-thinking platform engineer. I am known for staying calm during severity-1 outages, and I have built a career around one goal: reducing cognitive load for the developers who depend on the platform.

I started as a junior sysadmin at a logistics company in downtown Indianapolis, fell for Infrastructure as Code, and became the person who could automate days of manual work into seconds. Terraform, Ansible, and Helm were my golden hammers.

Then I built a "Wall of YAML". As the engineering team grew from 20 to 150 developers, almost every infrastructure change became a ticket for my team. A post-mortem for an outage caused by one misplaced bracket in a huge Terraform module made it clear: code is great for execution and terrible for shared mental models.

So I changed the approach. I now champion Infrastructure as Design: visual, collaborative, and guardrailed. Developers compose their environments on a canvas, the platform generates the compliant code underneath, and everyone can see how the services connect.

Today I lead a platform team with a clear mandate: treat the platform as a product, and make the developer experience intuitive, visual, and self-service.

Away from the keyboard, I am in the garage. Woodworking taught me the same lesson from the other direction: measure twice, design the joint before you cut it, and respect the grain you are given.

SEC. 02

Work history

  1. Platform Engineering Lead

    Apex Financial Technologies / Indianapolis, IN / Aug 2021 - Present

    • Led the shift from purely code-based infrastructure modules (Terraform) to visual Infrastructure as Design, enabling 200+ developers to compose and provision their own environments.
    • Cut average infrastructure provisioning time from 4 days (Jira tickets) to 15 minutes (self-service design canvases).
    • Integrated Meshery into the developer portal for real-time visual feedback on infrastructure configurations and automatic enforcement of organizational guardrails.
    • Lead a team of 8 platform and site reliability engineers, treating the internal developer platform as a first-class product.

  2. Senior DevOps Engineer

    Midwest Cloud Logistics / Indianapolis, IN / Feb 2017 - Aug 2021

    • Architected and maintained multi-region Kubernetes clusters serving 50,000+ daily active users.
    • Authored 100+ reusable Terraform modules and Helm charts to standardize microservice deployments.
    • Spotted the limits of massive IaC repositories when onboarding times spiked, and started the first internal pilots of visual topology mapping.
    • Implemented GitOps workflows with ArgoCD, reducing deployment errors by 40%.

  3. Cloud Systems Administrator

    IndyTech Solutions / Carmel, IN / Jun 2013 - Jan 2017

    • Automated legacy on-premise migrations to AWS using Ansible and Python.
    • Managed patching, networking, and access controls for a fleet of 300+ EC2 instances.
    • Primary incident commander for off-hours infrastructure alerts.

Education: B.S. in Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington (2013)

SEC. 03

Two workbenches

Workbench 01 / Engineering

The blueprint side

Designing platforms, reading topologies, and removing bottlenecks.

  • Infrastructure as Design
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • GitOps
  • Platform as a Product
  • DevSecOps
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS (EKS, VPC, IAM)
  • GCP
  • Terraform
  • Pulumi
  • Helm
  • ArgoCD
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Meshery
  • Kanvas
  • Envoy
  • Linux
  • CCNA
Workbench 02 / Workshop

The sawdust side

Furniture, joinery, and the occasional tree that has to come down. Same discipline, different material.

  • Furniture building
  • Hand-cut joinery
  • Hardwoods
  • Milling lumber
  • Tree felling
  • Shop safety

Read how the dining table came together

SEC. 04

Latest from both benches

All five posts

Let's talk platforms, or planers.

Whether you are untangling a Wall of YAML, designing a developer platform, or deciding between hard maple and white oak, I like a good conversation.

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