Mike Arpaia

My Experience

"You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive."

Maya Angelou

About Me

I'm a computer scientist professionally focused on machine learning and natural language processing. I currently lead data and technology efforts as Managing Partner & CTO at Moonfire.

Moonfire is an early-stage venture capital firm which aims to use software, data, and machine learning to optimize and accelerate every aspect of the venture capital lifecycle. At Moonfire, I'm responsible for defining and executing the firm's AI-focused technical strategy (with the help of some amazing engineers and researchers). My primary focus is on architecting and engineering our software, sourcing and modeling useful data, and creating machine learning solutions that enable Moonfire to leverage data for successful investments.

Experience

Moonfire Ventures

Managing Partner

November 2020 – Present

London, England, United Kingdom

At Moonfire, I'm responsible for the definition and delivery of the firm’s AI-focused 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. I am also deeply involved with the fundraising process through which I have helped Moonfire raise over 175 million dollars across three venture funds.

Workday

Machine Learning Architect

April 2020 – November 2020

London, England, United Kingdom

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

March 2019 – April 2020

Boulder, Colorado, United States

At Workday, I joined the Machine Learning organisation to lead the architecture, implementation, and productionalisation 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.

Mila - Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute

Machine Learning Research Engineer

May 2019 – May 2020

Montréal, Quebec, Canada

At Mila, I worked 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.

Kolide

Co-Founder & CTO

July 2016 – January 2019

Boulder, Colorado, United States

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 the 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.

Facebook

Engineering Manager

October 2015 – June 2016

Menlo Park, California, United States

After working as an individual contributor at Facebook, I became the Engineering Manager of the Intrusion Detection Infrastructure team. We were responsible for understanding the highest value components of Facebook's infrastructure and building systems to maintain deep insight into this infrastructure. In order to create real insight, we built realtime analytics infrastructure to understand and react to this data in realtime.

Software Engineer

February 2014 – October 2015

Menlo Park, California, United States

I joined the team at Facebook to work on improving operating system analytics capabilities, specifically on production Linux and macOS 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!

Etsy

Senior Software Engineer

July 2013 – February 2014

Brooklyn, New York, United States

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.

Software Engineer

October 2012 – July 2013

Brooklyn, New York, United States

While I was at Etsy, I was a Software Engineer working at the intersection of data science and distributed data systems. I spent a lot of time working on Etsy's distributed data analytics infrastructure and sharded MySQL infrastructure. I also built a custom host intrusion detection system for generating operating system telemetry across Etsy's infrastructure. Leveraging this data, I also built realtime analytics infrastructure to analyze this operating system telemetry in order to detect anomalies and compromise.

iSEC Partners

Security Engineer

August 2011 – October 2012

New York, New York, United States

At iSEC Partners, I was a penetration tester and security researcher, specializing in cryptography, secure protocols, and operating system security. I did research on mobile device exploitation, programming language security, and mobile application security.

Gotham Digital Science

Security Engineer

January 2011 – August 2012

New York, New York, United States

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.

Open-Source Experience

Osquery

Project Founder

Feb 2014 - Present

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 actively used by thousands of companies all over the world to detect and respond to security threats, data breaches, and other critical incidents.

Osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. The tools make low-level operating system analytics and monitoring both performant and intuitive. Osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL-based queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events, and file hashes.

I don't participate in osquery development anymore but I'm proud of the community that has grown around the project and I'm proud of the impact it has had on the security industry. I'm personally a big supporter of (and Moonfire is a proud investor in) Fleet Device Management which is co-founded by my friend and the co-creator of osquery, Zach Wasserman.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes Contributor

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.