MT mikethoun.com

Data & platform engineering leader

Mike Thoun

I build data platforms and lead the teams behind them, and I've worked every layer underneath: data centers at CME Group, eight years on the databases of a high-frequency options market maker, then the data platforms at Outcome Health, Lob, and Autograph. Now building golf products at Greenside Ventures.

Focus
Data platforms, data engineering, database systems
Current
Founder, Greenside Ventures
Head of Technology, Merino Wealth (contract)
Based
Chicago, IL
Previously
Autograph · Lob · Outcome Health · Spot Trading · CME Group
Contact
hello@mikethoun.com
01

Experience

  1. Feb 2025 – Now

    Greenside Ventures

    Founder

    Digital product studio and holding company in golf

    Building, launching, and scaling golf products end to end: GolfBod, Putt Pitch Drive, and Range Hero.

  2. Aug 2022 – Feb 20252y 7m

    Autograph

    Tech Lead, Data

    Tom Brady's digital sports fandom startup

    Owned data end to end. Built the data platform from the ground up: ingestion and orchestration across on-chain data, real-time sports feeds, event ticketing, and partner data (DraftKings, PGA TOUR); core dbt models; self-service analytics; ETL and reverse ETL into product and marketing tools.

    • Snowflake
    • dbt
    • Dagster
    • Fivetran
    • Hex
    • Lightdash
    • MongoDB
    • Neo4j
    • PostgreSQL
  3. Apr 2021 – Aug 20221y 5m

    Lob

    Staff Software Engineer, Data

    Y Combinator-backed mail API startup

    Technical lead for data. Rebuilt Lob's core data infrastructure as a modern data stack, and designed the core data model: a single source of truth consolidating internal and external datasets.

    • Event-driven data lake
    • Airflow
    • dbt
  4. Feb 2017 – May 20214y 4m

    Outcome Health

    Lead Data Engineer

    Chicago unicorn health tech startup (merged with PatientPoint, 2021)

    Technical lead for data engineering and database administration. Designed, built, and operationalized the core data and analytics platform, batch and streaming.

    • Python
    • Redshift
    • Airflow
    • Confluent Kafka
    • Spark
    • S3
  5. Apr 2016 – Now

    Merino Wealth Management

    ContractHead of Technology

    Financial planning startup focused on equity compensation, socially responsible investing, and empowering women entrepreneurs

    Oversees technology operations.

  6. Jan 2009 – Feb 20178y 2m

    Spot Trading

    Lead Database Administrator

    High-frequency options market maker

    Principal database administrator and engineer. Architected, deployed, and managed SQL and NoSQL systems totaling over 75 TB.

    • SQL Server
    • MongoDB
    • Cassandra
    • Vertica
    • Redshift
    • RDS
  7. Jul 2005 – Dec 20083y 6m

    CME Group

    Infrastructure Engineer II

    World's largest derivatives exchange

    Data Center and Computing Infrastructure team. Built and ran the team's internal web app for planning changes and tracking physical assets and network cable paths across CME's data centers.

02

Toolkit

Practice

  • Data architecture
  • Data engineering
  • Database administration
  • DevOps & infrastructure
  • Software engineering
  • Engineering leadership

Data platform

  • Python, SQL
  • Snowflake, Redshift
  • dbt
  • Airflow, Dagster
  • Kafka, Spark
  • Fivetran, Hex, Lightdash

Databases

  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Cassandra
  • Vertica
  • Neo4j
03

Now

Greenside Ventures

Founder

A digital product studio in the golf space. These days the toolkit is pointed at golf: same engineering, smaller blast radius.

04

Contact