Michael Borglin

What do you do?

I'm a software engineering manager at the largest cryptocurrency company in the world, Coinbase. I manage a team of 10 or so software engineers that focus on internal operations productivity and developer experience.

How did you get there?

I graduated from UW Eau Claire in 2013 and moved out to San Francisco. I took a consulting position at a small consulting company of just 15 employees. I stayed there for about a year, but consulting just wasn't the right place for me. I wanted to work on a product. After being in San Francisco for a year, I still hadn't developed a good community that I could leverage to move into a larger product driven company, so I decided to go to a three month coding academy called Hack Reactor. Hack Reactor helped me build a network of engineers and helped me land an interview at SolarCity.

SolarCity was my first real software engineering job. I worked there doing back end and occasionally front end work. I got a promotion to tech lead of my team of seven engineers. At the same time SolarCity was purchased by Tesla. After the merger had completed, Tesla decided to close down our office in San Francisco and shut down the projects my team had been focusing on. This gave me a good opportunity to pivot into the world of cryptocurrencies. I left Tesla at the end of 2017 with the intention to start my own company.

During 2018 I dove into the crypto world head first and ultimately found a space to contribute. I started a payments processing company called Lightning Ramp that leveraged the Lightning Network. Our product helped crypto exchanges like Coinbase allow their users to send funds to and from the Lightning network at near zero cost. The idea was grand, and some companies use this technique today. Ultimately, my timing was too early. A new opportunity with another crypto company named Casa appeared, and my team was acquired by them. We spent the next few years building products at Casa such as a self hosted multisig wallet and stand alone Bitcoin and Lightning Network node. In 2020 I left Casa to work as an Engineering Manager at Coinbase. Casa is a profitable company today.

What advice do you have for current computer science students?

Always keep a sense of curiosity about you. Software engineering is continuously evolving. Continuous learning is one of the attributes we look for!

Contact information:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelborglin/

Posted November 8, 2021