Engineer, 18 years in. Currently leading engineering at Omaze. Sydney, working globally.

You probably came here from my CV or LinkedIn. Fair — here's the unvarnished version.

I'm Michael. Engineering Lead at Omaze for the last two years — shipped the German market in under three months on a two-engineer team plus a Shopify agency, and the platform's still mine to feed. The day-to-day is Shopify + AWS Lambda + Node/TS, with a fair bit of Go and the usual integrations zoo (Stripe, Recharge, KYC providers, PostHog).

I know the shape of the problem that probably brought you here. A messy multi-platform stack, fragmented data, a team that's been promised AI-something for two quarters running, and a launch date someone in marketing already committed to. I've been the engineer in that seat enough times to know what helps and what doesn't — and what I won't pretend to. That's the thing I'm useful for.

Before Omaze: Engineering Manager at A2B, UI Tech Lead at Westpac, sole engineer on a feature at Optus, Head of Engineering at LJ Hooker for nearly four years (also the first engineering hire there). Further back, four years as Tech Lead at Ansarada on the .NET / ASP.NET MVC migration of a high-security M&A data room.

I also run Xstep, my consulting vehicle — it's how the Omaze engagement is structured, and how I take on other client work alongside it.

I keep some side projects to stay sharp:

• Carely.au — NDIS automation. The AutoLeGen playbook applied to a regulated care market.
• Vidory.ai — personal R&D on AI media. Quiet for now.

🤖  Agentic systems that carry real engineering load (not tool calls dressed up as agents).
🧩  Consolidating multi-platform stacks so AI gets to do real work, not slideware.
🎓  Productising AI-delivery workshops — identity-coding, agentic workflows, eval discipline.
📺  Narrative → storyboard → motion: where AI actually earns its keep in long-form video.
🏥  Carely.au — growing the NDIS platform.

I read your code, I don't just review it. The fun engineering happens at the seams — Shopify ↔ ERP, identity ↔ payments, ETL ↔ ML. That's where I'm most useful. I'm fluent across the modern AI agentic stack (LangGraph, RAG, evals) but I'd rather argue about eval design than vibe-coding. Lean teams. Small SOWs. Ship, learn, then the next one.

I won't pretend to actively use everything below in any given month — but everything here is something I've shipped to production at some point in the last 18 years.

Languages

Backend & frameworks

Frontend & mobile

Cloud & infra

Data & analytics

Commerce, payments & integrations

Email is fastest: michael@xstep.au — usually within a business day. Happy to chat about engineering, agentic systems, market launches, or anything else that's interesting. If you're hiring or have a piece of work in mind, just say so in the first line.

📧 michael@xstep.au  ·  💼 LinkedIn