MA

Mike Arpaia

Managing Partner at Moonfire 🌗🔥

United Kingdom

Invests in

Stages:

Locations:

  • Min Investment:

    $100,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $5,000,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $1,500,000.00

Work Experience

2020

  • Managing Partner

    2020

    Moonfire is an early-stage venture capital firm which aims to use software, data, and machine learning to optimise and accelerate every aspect of the venture capital lifecycle. At Moonfire, I'm responsible for defining and executing the firm's AI-focused technical strategy. My primary focus is on architecting and engineering our software, sourcing and modeling useful data, and creating machine learning solutions that enable Moonfire to leverage data for successful investments.

  • Artificial Intelligence Advisor

    2022 - 2023

    The Technology and Science Insights (TSI) unit at the Government Office for Science produce Rapid Technology Assessments (RTA) for emerging fields of science and technology. I helped with the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Technology Assessment throughout 2022 and 2023. During that time, I worked with the team to map and taxonomize the modern AI & ML landscape and participated in the final presentation of the RTA to over 150 people across the UK government. The Government Office for Science does great work and I'm pleased to have been able to contribute to their efforts!

2019 - 2020

  • Machine Learning Architect

    2020 - 2020

    After helping to build, launch, and scale a distributed embedding-based search and recommendation system, I was promoted to Architect (Workday’s Director-level IC role) and my responsibilities shifted to emphasize explicit focus on establishing and unifying the architecture and strategy for wider data science and engineering initiatives in an effort to optimize for the velocity and rigor of methodological inquiry as well as the long-term scalability and stability of the platform across all research and engineering groups.

  • Principal Machine Learning Engineer

    2019 - 2020

    At Workday, I joined the Machine Learning organization to spearhead the architecture, implementation, and productionalization of a distributed embedding-based search and multi-document matching engine. I played a key role in designing and delivering various components of the stack, which we successfully launched and scaled to support several generally available Workday products within the Recruiting, Learning, and Talent product organizations.

  • Machine Learning Research Engineer

    2019 - 2020

    At Mila, I worked on software and infrastructure engineering objectives for a project which aimed to raise awareness and conceptual understanding of climate change by depicting accurate and personalised outcomes of climate change using cutting-edge techniques from artificial intelligence and climate modelling.

2016 - 2019

  • Co-Founder & CTO

    2016 - 2019

    As the Co-Founder and CTO of a small venture-backed infrastructure analytics startup, I built and led a high-performing, fully-remote engineering organisation with engineers in every US timezone. I also acted as the lead the architect and developer for almost all of our backend, infrastructure, and operating system software. As Co-Founder, my role also allowed me to spend time as a frequent author of blog articles, part-time salesman, periodic financial negotiator, persistent pedagogue, etc.

2014 - 2016

  • Engineering Manager

    2015 - 2016

    After working as an individual contributor at Facebook, I became the Engineering Manager of the Intrusion Detection Infrastructure team. We were responsible for understanding the highest value components of Facebook's infrastructure and building systems to maintain deep insight into this infrastructure. In order to create real insight, we built realtime analytics infrastructure to understand and react to this data in realtime.

  • Software Engineer

    2014 - 2015

    I joined the team at Facebook to work on improving operating system analytics capabilities, specifically on production Linux and macOS which were falling behind Windows tools from vendors. To accomplish this across all of Facebook's environments, I created the osquery project and widely deployed it throughout corp and production with enormous help from an amazing team. Osquery is the most starred security project on all of GitHub!

2012 - 2014

  • Senior Software Engineer

    2013 - 2014

    After helping to establish several aspects of Etsy’s infrastructure and application security practices, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer where I was the youngest Senior Engineer in the history of the company as well as the only engineer to have ever been an active participant in both the Engineering and Operations on-call rotations.

  • Software Engineer

    2012 - 2013

    While I was at Etsy, I was a Software Engineer working at the intersection of data science and distributed data systems. I spent a lot of time working on Etsy's distributed data analytics infrastructure and sharded MySQL infrastructure. I also built a custom host intrusion detection system for generating operating system telemetry across Etsy's infrastructure. Leveraging this data, I also built realtime analytics infrastructure to analyse this operating system telemetry in order to detect anomalies and compromise.

2011 - 2012

  • Security Engineer

    2011 - 2012

    At iSEC Partners, I was a penetration tester and security researcher, specialising in cryptography, secure protocols, and operating system security. I did research on mobile device exploitation, programming language security, and mobile application security.

  • Security Engineer

    2011 - 2011

    I did security assessments for GDS while also a Computer Science student at Stevens Institute of Technology. I participated in infrastructure and application assessments for a variety of large financial and technology companies.