Michael Chavez

Director of Technology · Bethesda, MD

Michael Chavez

Mucho trabajo, pocito dinero

The architect

Twenty years hands-on, shipping platforms

Still in the code where it counts. Content platforms, search architecture and migrations for organisations whose content outgrew the system holding it — the work of deciding what to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone.

The leader

Running the teams that ship them

Director-level ownership of delivery, vendors and technical direction. The part that makes the architecture stick: the roadmap it lives on, the people who maintain it, and the case for it in a room that does not write code.

See selected work ↓

About

Most technology directors stopped building a decade ago. I did not, and it is the reason the two columns above are one job rather than two.

Knowing what a migration actually costs — because you have run one — changes the estimate you give, the vendor you pick, and how quickly you can tell when a plan is going wrong. I have spent twenty years on platform work in agencies and in-house, and the last several leading the teams doing it.

The case studies below are the short version: what the problem was, what I decided, and what it changed.

Selected work

Challenge, decision, result — with the seat I held on each one stated explicitly.

Sole Architect 2023 Platform strategy

Find-it-First for the Department of Education

U.S. Department of Education (via AgencyQ)

Placeholder wireframe of the federated search results page.

Sixty thousand pages of grant guidance across four legacy properties, with no shared taxonomy. Applicants were abandoning before they found the programme they qualified for.

Shipped in phases across two quarters with no content freeze. Search became the primary navigation path rather than a fallback.

  • 38%

    drop in search abandonment

  • 4

    properties federated

  • 0

    days of content freeze

  • Optimizely
  • Azure Search
  • .NET
Technical Lead 2021 Architecture

Find Your Fit certification matcher

HRCI (via RP3)

Seven overlapping certifications and a self-assessment quiz that routed most visitors to the wrong one.

Enquiries arriving through the matcher converted at a materially higher rate, and the certification team stopped filing tickets to adjust quiz logic.

2.4x

increase in qualified enquiries

  • React
  • Contentful

Writing

Published on Medium. Mostly about platform decisions and the arguments around them.

Currently open to Director-level roles

If you are hiring for someone who can hold both the architecture and the team, I would like to hear about it.

Read the résumé

or email me · LinkedIn