Michael Cox - Vardera, Paddle, ProfitWell

Work history

Vardera

Paddle

ProfitWell

Hudson Collaborative, Inc.

hodgsonConsulting, LLC

Vardera

JAN 2025 - PRESENT · 1.8 years

Co-Founder and CTO

JAN 2025 - PRESENT · 1.8 years

Vardera is the visual intelligence layer for collectibles. We build deep learning systems that identify, grade, price, and authenticate physical goods at scale — delivering computer vision performance in seconds that foundation models can't match. Our enterprise partners use us to turn marketplaces people browse into marketplaces people trust.

Paddle

MAY 2022 - SEP 2023 · 1.4 years

VP of Engineering

MAY 2022 - SEP 2023 · 1.4 years

Led the engineering integration of ProfitWell into Paddle post-acquisition, then took ownership of Paddle's Platform teams - SRE, Architecture, and Engineering Ops. These teams enabled product development across the company by building shared infrastructure, maintaining system reliability, and providing technical guidance on architectural decisions.

ProfitWell

MAR 2018 - MAY 2022 · 4.3 years

Head of Engineering

MAR 2018 - MAY 2022 · 4.3 years

Led engineering at ProfitWell, growing the team from 5 to 30 engineers as we built a product that nearly 30% of all SaaS companies used at its peak. Beyond just engineering, I also handled security and data privacy to keep customer data safe and ensure compliance. Throughout this growth, I established the engineering foundation that enabled us to serve thousands of customers reliably while scaling from startup to acquisition.

Migrated ProfitWell Infrastructure from Heroku to Kubernetes on AWS

When I joined ProfitWell, the infrastructure was running on Heroku instances—a setup that worked for getting started but had become a significant constraint on our growth. Engineers were manually pushing code from their local machines directly to production without any CI validation, which introduced deployment risk. Heroku's IaaS costs were substantially higher than running our own VMs on AWS, and we were rapidly approaching their hard limit of 10 instances per service on our main processing workload. For a bootstrapped company planning to scale, this wasn't sustainable. My mandate was clear: support 10x growth in data processing volume while keeping infrastructure costs in check, and accomplish it without downtime or expanding the ops team. I executed a carefully staged migration to eliminate these bottlenecks. I started by provisioning a parallel Kubernetes cluster in AWS and building Terraform modules to codify each service's infrastructure. Next, I established CI/CD pipelines in CircleCI that automated Docker image builds and deployments via Helm charts—replacing the risky manual process with a reliable merge-and-deploy workflow. To minimize risk, I migrated services incrementally, beginning with lower-priority background jobs before tackling the customer-facing API. The results were immediate and measurable. We cut infrastructure costs by roughly 20% right away while completely removing the scaling ceiling that Heroku had imposed. The new Kubernetes environment could scale horizontally to meet our 10x growth target without architectural rewrites. Just as importantly, the CI/CD automation freed engineers from manual deployment toil and dramatically reduced deployment risk, allowing the team to ship faster and with greater confidence. This foundation enabled ProfitWell to scale efficiently without ballooning headcount or cloud spend.

Validated by 2

EYTS

Hudson Collaborative, Inc.

SEP 2010 - FEB 2018 · 7.5 years

Fractional Software Engineer

SEP 2010 - FEB 2018 · 7.5 years

Spent 8 years as a fractional software engineer, primarily working with startups in the Boston area. Specialized in coming into engineering teams and building applications that could handle real scale - usually working with modern web technologies like Node.js, React, TypeScript, and AWS. Whether it was architecting HIPAA-compliant systems for Fortune 100 healthcare companies or building the foundational product for new startups from scratch, made living by being the engineer teams called when they needed something done right.

hodgsonConsulting, LLC

FEB 2005 - AUG 2010 · 5.6 years

Chief Technology Officer

FEB 2005 - AUG 2010 · 5.6 years

hodgsonConsulting was a full service web agency in the Washington DC area. During tenure oversaw the development of between 150 and 200 software projects, managing a team of 30+ project managers, designers, and software engineers. Clients were mostly federal and local government, associations, and non-profits.