Michael Harris

Michael Harris builds systems end-to-end — technical foundation, business logic, and the operational economics that decide whether either survives contact with production. His work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, applied AI, payments, and data architecture, and his particular strength is integration: taking complexity spread across domains and resolving it into designs a team can actually execute against.

That range comes from more than a decade spent on both sides of the vendor relationship. At Pivotal Software he deployed GemFire and Cloud Foundry into strategic customer environments; at CloudBees he built CI/CD pipelines across Java, Node.js, React, and Python codebases; at Pachyderm he debugged customers' Kubernetes deployments alongside the Go, React, and Node product code underneath them. More recently the work has been squarely in AI systems — containerizing and optimizing ML pipelines onto AWS at Apex Systems, prototyping LLM-based retrieval agents across ten-plus data lakes at RBA Consulting, and applying LLMs to NP-hard scheduling problems normally left to constraint solvers at Artium AI.

DarcStar Technologies is not the first company to carry the name. In 2015 he founded DarcStar Solutions, a big-data consultancy built around Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Mahout, and Spark for companies without the internal capability to run them. The current company inherits the disposition — independent work on hard systems problems — with another decade of practice behind it.

He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University and an MBA in Business and Finance from Bradley University's Foster College of Business — a combination that shows up in how he frames engineering decisions, which is rarely as purely technical ones.

Experience

Principal Systems Architect

Ledger Rocket 2025–Present

Systems architecture and AI software development on a contract engagement.

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Artium AI 2025

Applied Gemini LLMs to NP-hard scheduling problems normally handled by constraint solvers. Built a domain-driven, event-sourced Kotlin admin system and an NCPDP message-replay service for an intermediary in the pharmacy-benefit space.

Senior DevOps (MLOps) Engineer

Apex Systems 2024

Containerized and optimized ML pipelines with data scientists, migrating workloads from Domino to Docker on AWS EC2 for a 10x reduction in turnaround. Built a modular DIVE plugin in Python that halved implementation time for new pipelines.

Senior Software Engineer

RBA Consulting 2023–2024

Modernized two legacy applications (Java 7 to 21, Spring Boot 2.0 to 3.2), introduced TDD for Python and PyTorch models, and prototyped LLM-based agents retrieving across ten-plus data lakes. Led a team of three.

Customer Engineer

Pachyderm 2022–2023

Customer-facing engineering on a Kubernetes-native data platform: debugging customer deployments and Go, React, and Node product code, plus architectural guidance and training.

DevOps Consultant

CloudBees 2020–2022

CI/CD consulting for high-value accounts, building proof-of-concept pipelines across Java, Node.js, React, and Python codebases.

Designated Support Engineer

Pivotal Software 2015–2019

Deployed and integrated GemFire and Pivotal Cloud Foundry in strategic customer environments, with technical workshops, infrastructure roadmaps, and post-implementation support.

Founder & CEO

DarcStar Solutions 2015

Founded a big-data consultancy for companies without the internal capability — Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Mahout, and Spark, deployed to Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and internal infrastructure. The direct ancestor of DarcStar Technologies.

Systems Analyst

State Farm 2012–2015

Systems analysis and Java/Spring development on a banking system, plus root-cause analysis, data modeling, and scalable applications for data extraction, analysis, and indexing.

Focus areas