Systems Integration & Infrastructure Architect | Founder, OutOfBoxIdeas LLC

MICHAEL WILLIAMS

Groveport, OH · 614-285-IDEA (4332) · michael@outofboxideas.com

Approach

How I Work

Twenty-five years of walking into undocumented, failing, or nonexistent systems and leaving behind stable, documented operations that don't need me. I build so that anyone can take over — full documentation, embedded troubleshooting tools, trained handoffs. My value isn't what I guard; it's how I think.

Operating philosophy: Agency. Adaptation. Action.
Find the real constraint. Engineer the simplest solution that holds. Document the path so the next person walks it without me.

Selected work

What I've Done

Rescue work under fire. Forensically recovered a county Oracle database in a single 24-hour session — no prior Oracle experience — restoring payroll the day it was due. Flagged the failing hardware weeks in advance from monitoring logs and had the replacement part staged before it died. Repeated the feat six years later: full overnight server recovery for a paving company, operational by morning.

Solving the "impossible." Diagnosed in one day a hardware failure that had stumped an internal dev team for five years, then built a deterministic, hardware-agnostic baseline image with embedded technician rebuild tools and a PXE server to mass-deploy it across 60 units — in one week.

Building departments from nothing. Established TIBA Parking's North American integrations department from the ground up: reverse-engineered an undocumented .NET/MSSQL platform, unlocked international SaaS integrations (Parkmobile, SpotHero), delivered 16+ enterprise middleware deployments (The Kennedy Center, Strong National Museum of Play, Virginia Hospital Center, Jacksonville Airport), and increased deployment productivity 590% — turning a cost center into a revenue unit.

Modernization at scale. Migrated core enterprise systems to Azure with 75% resource reduction; led SOC2 compliance with HashiCorp Vault secrets management; virtualized 70% of a county agency's infrastructure; migrated 315+ mailboxes to Office 365 and replaced nationwide telephony — most of it as a sole operator.

Speed as a discipline. AWS fleet reporting for 930+ instances built in three days where none existed. A company-wide event management web app designed, built, and deployed in four hours. A from-scratch, zero-dependency Node.js middleware service for a hospital DMZ — with transaction-level diagnostics and automated test stack — in two days.

Experience

Career at a Glance

Years	Role
2025–present	Senior Integrations Specialist — TIBA Parking / FAAC Technologies
2023–2025	Lead Engineer — Zipline Logistics
2022–2023	Senior Middleware Administrator — Big Lots
2017–2022	Systems Integration Specialist — TIBA Parking
2016–2017	IT Manager — Coastal Ridge Real Estate
2014–2016	National IT Director — M&S Media (Ohio Media Schools)
2009–2014	Network Operations / Security Manager — Franklin County JFS
2000–2009	Network Administrator & support roles — Pickaway County, Coldwell Banker, others
2002–present	Founder & Lead Engineer — OutOfBoxIdeas LLC (continuous, parallel)

Tools

Core Stack

Cloud & Virtualization:: Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, KVM, Hyper-V, VMware, Proxmox
Integration & Automation:: Node.js, Python, REST/API middleware, Node-RED, Bash, PowerShell, SQL
Identity & Security:: OIDC/SSO, Azure AD, Zero Trust, HashiCorp Vault, SOC2/HIPAA compliance
Infrastructure:: Networking (routing, VLAN, VPN, fiber/copper), monitoring (Splunk, Zabbix, Grafana), PXE/imaging automation
Emerging:: RAG pipelines, local LLM routing, containerized inference

Working style

Who I Am as a Worker

No single point of failure — including me. Every system I build ships with documentation, training, and handoff paths. Job security through hoarding is a con; reputation through transferred capability compounds.
The constraint first, the technology second. Sometimes the fix is automation. Sometimes it's a process change. Occasionally it's nontechnical. I sell solutions, not billable hours of my favorite tools.
Calm in the failure state. The 3 AM recovery, the account on fire, the system nobody understands — that's the environment I've done my best work in for two decades.
Self-taught, deliberately. Most of a modern stack learned by building, breaking, and rebuilding it — a habit that hasn't stopped. Currently: Terraform, Kubernetes, and cloud security certifications in progress.

Full detailed work history and references available on request.

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