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Systems Engineer · Investment Management · Boston, MA

Where packets
meet profit.

A no-fluff engineering journal from the trenches of financial infrastructure. Written by a systems engineer who lives in terminals, tames distributed systems, and occasionally questions the meaning of uptime.

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Hey, I'm Michael.

// Online as sys.ghost

I'm Michael - 32, a Systems Engineer based in the Boston area, currently in asset management. Before this I've had stints in private equity, retail tech, and broader technology roles, which means I've seen how infrastructure holds up (or doesn't) across very different business contexts.

In PE, I learned that data quality is the difference between a deal and a disaster. In retail, I learned what scale actually means. In asset management, I'm learning that the hardest problems are almost never technical. This blog is my honest journal of all of it: equal parts deep-dive and field notes from someone who has spent a decade at the intersection of systems engineering and financial services.

I started Packet & Profit because the writing I wanted to read - candid, technically grounded, from inside finance rather than adjacent to it - didn't really exist. If you're an engineer in financial services, or curious about what that world looks like from the infrastructure side, you're in the right place.

My Stack

RHEL / Ubuntu
Kubernetes
Terraform
Ansible
Prometheus
Grafana
Python / Bash
AWS / Azure
Cisco / Palo Alto
PostgreSQL
Redis
HashiCorp Vault

Journey

Now
Senior Systems Engineer, Asset Management
Managing trading infrastructure, network security, and cloud migration. Boston, MA.
Mid-career
Systems Engineer, Private Equity
Built and maintained data infrastructure supporting deal teams and portfolio monitoring. Survived multiple due diligence seasons.
Earlier
Infrastructure Engineer, Retail Technology
Learned what scale actually means. Inventory systems, real-time pricing, supply chain integrations under peak load.
Foundation
IT Engineer, Technology Sector
Building the fundamentals. Data centers, networking, and a healthy respect for cable labeling.
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Whether you are an engineer in financial services, have a question about something I have written, or just want to say hello - feel free to reach out. I read everything.

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