What This Page Is For
This page keeps proof separate from story and routing. It exists for people who need more than a homepage and an about page before deciding whether there is a fit.
Selected Case Studies
These are the flagship case studies — written to show the full shape of the work: the context, the system that was built, what came of it, and the patterns worth reusing.
- Scaling to Millions of Loan Customers — deep technical expertise and project management for a multi-year scaling initiative on a Fortune 1000 loan servicer’s serverless AWS platform: five validated scaling threats, Architecture Decision Records, and a tracked roadmap to millions of active loans within a strict per-loan cost ceiling.
- Lumate AdTrade — Algorithmic Ad Media Trading Platform — co-founding and building a real-time market-maker in programmatic advertising: sub-300ms decisions billions of times per day, a pre-TensorFlow continuously-learning pricing pipeline, and honest venture-design lessons from how it ended.
- Great Data Lake LLC — Data Brokerage and Value-Add Business — founding a data company that turned hundreds of terabytes of monthly raw streams into clean, compliant, subscription data products: derivative products, compliance as infrastructure, and a production-pipeline sampling system.
- Six-Month Turnaround of Stalled Defense Projects — unblocking a year-stalled, multi-project initiative in six months by translating technical conflict, reverting to proven infrastructure, and installing execution mechanics that made progress visible again.
The full index of shorter project snapshots is at Projects for Work.
What People Say
Upwork
Upwork has verified my work at its highest tier — Expert-Vetted status, an invitation-only distinction reserved for a small number of top-performing freelancers on the platform. The reviews below are unedited, from Upwork’s public record.
“Michael is engaging, intelligent, creative and experienced. He very quickly understood our analytics/spatial ETL problem, got excited about it, and started creating structure, momentum and results (well documented). Loved working with him!”
— Apache Spark / Databricks big data spatial ETL processing, 5.0★, Aug 2019 – Jan 2020, 57 hours
“Mike has done phenomenal work with us. His knowledge of Redshift, Spark and overall DB concepts are extraordinary. He brings high energy and passion to every engagement and I have enjoyed working with him. I look forward to engaging with him for future projects.”
— Retail POS data warehouse ETL and data model development, 5.0★, Oct 2018 – Jun 2019, 381 hours
“Michael did a very nice job building Tableau workbooks and dashboards for us. He has great communication and attention to detail. Thanks Michael.”
— Tableau dashboard development, 5.0★, Mar – Apr 2019, 27 hours
Recommendations
Written by people who worked with me directly, from the earliest chapter of building something from nothing: the SUB Light & Sound student business and the founding of the Interdisciplinary Design Collaborative.
“Michael’s performance as Director was, in a word, outstanding. As a technician for SUB Light & Sound, I worked directly under Michael, whose primary duties were maintaining inventory, booking events, and scheduling personnel. However, he both fulfilled and exceeded those duties, going above and beyond to improve Light & Sound, expanding business opportunities through innovative marketing, and recruiting talented new employees through a targeted recruitment campaign. Under Michael’s leadership, Light & Sound flourished, and his accomplishments as Director are impressive, considering that he was also a student at the time. I thoroughly recommend Michael for any task or endeavor, by merit of his leadership and management abilities, his enterprising determination, and his inspiring and unwavering positive attitude.”
— Benjamin Larson, Developer at SolutionsX; reported to Michael directly, 2011
“All of Lando’s work can be summed up simply: he pushes the envelope. Not only does Lando think and act big, he convinces those around him to have confidence in their ability to do great things, and gives them the tools for success. With any project Lando takes on, from audio mixing a concert to pioneering a start-up business, he makes big promises and then continually over-delivers on them. He is a rare breed of visionary leadership, excellent personality, and technical savvy. You will be hard-pressed to find a better person to work with, or for.”
— Matt Camden, Director of Ticketing at Mammoth, 2011 (“Lando” was Michael’s nickname and the name behind Lando Consulting)
“Determined, Responsible, and Innovative are some of the many words that come to mind when you think of Michael Orlando. He is great to work for, work with and just chat with. A business man and innovator in every sense of the words.”
— Sean Sill, Senior Manager / Staff Firmware Engineer / Architect at Astra, 2011
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with Michael as his business counselor as well as his client. He founded Interdisciplinary Design Collaborative (IDC) as an undergraduate which demonstrates his initiative and work ethic. I had the opportunity to work with Michael when he was hired by the Missouri SBTDC to produce an instructional and promotional video for our office. The work that he and his company did was very high quality and very reasonably priced. He also led IDC’s successful efforts to win a highly competitive SBIR research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy as well as the company’s launch of several successful iPhone apps. I recommend Michael Orlando and IDC enthusiastically.”
— Malcolm Townes, PhD, Science & Technology Policy / Technology Transfer; Michael’s business counselor and client, 2010
“Michael is a rare individual: both technical and creative. He sees the big picture but knows how to focus on the details to ensure that the task is done with the highest quality. His creativity, drive, and good nature make him an absolute pleasure to work with. He is generous with both his time and energy, and every stage of a project displays his diligence.”
— Seth Orsborn, Product Design & Innovation; Michael’s client, 2010
Certifications
Selected digital badges are viewable on Credly.
- Atlassian Certified Jira Administrator for Cloud — 2023
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate — 2023
- Google Associate Cloud Engineer — 2020
- AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty — 2019
- Databricks Certified Developer: Apache Spark 2.x for Scala — 2019
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — 2018
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — 2018
- AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty — 2018
- AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty — 2018
- Tableau Desktop Qualified Associate — 2018
- Alteryx Advanced Certified — 2018
- Alteryx Core Certified — 2018
Education
- Masters of Science, Engineering Management — Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2010–2012
- Graduate Certificate, Human Systems Integration — Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2012
- Graduate Certificate, Project Management — Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2011
- Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering — Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2004–2010
- Bachelor of Science, Interdisciplinary Engineering — Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2004–2009
Beyond This Site
The strongest proof beyond this page is spread across About, Work & Ventures, Ideas & Writing, and Speaking & Media.
The most useful public reference points right now are:
- GitHub for technical work, tooling, and systems artifacts
- Stack Overflow for practical infrastructure and problem-solving traces
- Upwork for the most explicit public consulting, data, and architecture framing
- Medium for longer-form writing about craft, clarity, and systems
- Dribbble for visual, UX, and design-oriented history
If you want the more human, long-horizon version of that public trail, Goodreads and Last.fm add useful texture without changing the core message.