Michael Antry

Hello world! My name is

Michael Antry

Growing up in a rural town in Southern Illinois, I learned to love technology by tinkering on my dad's Macintosh PowerPC, where I would code a MySpace website, edit a photo with GIMP, and map the labyrinths of Myst. Now, I map a different kind of labyrinth: the enterprise systems and IT organizations that millions of people depend on every day. I pride myself on shipping things that people can trust and rely on for the most important things in their lives, like healthcare, finances, and agriculture. I'm always looking for ways to connect with my community, learn from people who see things differently, and build something good for the world around me, so please reach out.

Work

  • Staff Engineer @ CVS Health / Aetna 2024 – 2026 Learned how to scale my products to 37 million healthcare members and my influence to 15,000 engineers, product managers, and engineering leaders. Built traditional, AI-driven, and hybrid search systems for those members, with quality gates that grade every change against real queries. Negotiated the organization's first realistic, evidence-based Service Level Objectives (SLOs), weighing real user impact against the cost of on-call staffing (and saving myself a few hours of on-call, too). Along the way, I revived a 200-engineer guild and rescued an orphaned service 60 days before Open Enrollment, and found my biggest accomplishments happened when the team no longer needed me.
  • Senior Software Engineer @ Bayer 2021 – 2024 Built the API layer scientists around the world use to design experiments on the world's largest plant-genetics database. Owned a safety-evaluation pipeline that decided which plants moved forward, scaling it to 600,000 sequences a run on infrastructure that shut itself off between jobs. Also ran a book club, which turned out to be good practice for getting engineers and scientists to read the same page.
  • Software Engineer @ Ocelot Consulting UniGroup Prattle 2017 – 2020 Cut my teeth on full-stack web product development and cloud consulting at startups and big enterprises alike. Ocelot was later acquired by Accenture, and Prattle by Liquidnet.
  • IT Professional 2010 – 2017 Worked IT helpdesks through high school and college, where I learned how to turn a frustrated customer into a happy one with my expertise, charm, and most importantly, the phrase “I'm not totally sure, but let me find out for you.”

School

Fun

  • Trombone Player I play with jazz bands and chamber groups all around Chicago. Previously played semi-professionally in St. Louis with the St. Louis Brass Band and the Muny Pit Orchestra.
  • Photography I like to take pictures of my friends and the world around me. See more on VSCO.