Michael Gaskin-Interim Technology Leadership
Check rate
Experience
Lead Global eCommerce Operations
PUMAGroup
- Bedrock technology operations role providing the foundations on which PUMA's global product teams build PUMA.com and associated systems
- Managed a €3.5 million CAPEX portfolio including ~20 externals and 16 platform and tooling vendors
- Started up and led five functional teams for platform engineering, cloud administration, edge technology, continuous performance testing, and L2 support / incident management
- Person of last resort for mysteries, intractable bugs, compliance crises, litigation support, and black-hole issues where ownership was unclear or contested
- Sole author and driver of a multi-million-euro, multi-year RFP for Global Operations Center serving the direct-to-consumer technology estate for eCommerce, order management, and brick-and-mortar retail tech support
- Conceived, designed, developed and productionized Order Viewer, a secure internal application providing observability into PUMA.com order data at sub-second latency; independently delivered architecture, implementation, GCP deployment, SSO integration and organizational compliance.
Senior DevOps Manager, Global eCommerce
PUMAGroup
- Recruited from North America to join the Global team in Germany for a technological moonshot to develop a new headless commerce solution for major PUMA.com markets in North America, the EU, India, Japan and Oceania
- Founding project team member and name-giver of Cybercat, a solution comprising a custom-built React/NextJS storefront running in the public cloud, a React Native mobile app for iOS and Android, a modern content management system (Sanity), and a GraphQL backend-for-frontend API to interface with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and other data sources
- Responsible for cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, observability, and deployment pipelines (CI/CD)
- Identified and seized an opportunity to switch from x86 to Graviton-based Lambda functions to save a mid-six-figure amount on compute cost annually
- Selected and built out PUMA's observability stack from scratch with Coralogix for logs and APM, Anodot anomaly detection and Checkly synthetic monitoring
Manager – eCommerce Site Operations
PUMAGroup
- Led the development team building out and operating the US and Canada PUMA.com sites ($170M annual revenue)
- First point of escalation for all incidents, outages, and bugs affecting the US and Canada sites
- Successfully balanced competing demands between regional and global roadmap items, bugs, pain points, and technical debt by creating a single-pane-of-glass view of all Work In Progress in Miro
- Led the organization in bi-annual roadmap planning and weekly tactical adjustments; encouraged horse-trading among stakeholders and enforced tradeoffs to protect development team capacity
- Delivered new capabilities including Apple Pay, Buy Now Pay Later options, outfit recommendations with Stylitics, post-purchase delivery assurance with Narvar, migration to global SAP Emarsys email platform, Ambassador Card support for athletes and celebrities, WCAG accessibility compliance, a wishlist, improved observability with Splunk, and more
IT Service Management Analyst
MathWorks
- Designed incident, problem, and release management processes within an evolving Platform Engineering function
- Streamlined major incident collaboration by introducing a ChatOps-based system with xMatters and Microsoft Teams
- Created a contract management system using Jira and Riada Insight to replace fragmented spreadsheets
Principal Analyst – IT Service Management
Staples
- Founding member and name-giver of the Continual Service Improvement team within Staples Digital Solutions
- Unearthed a decade-old enterprise process map of Staples and used it to change the way the organization thought about IT reliability and availability
- Completed a short-term assignment with the DotcomSupport team to improve L2 incident and bug handling for Staples.com, a top 5 online retailer; helped the team to make better use of ServiceNow and Jira to prevent issues from stalling and falling out of view
- Stepped in as temporary Product Owner for an analytics team in crisis and used Weighted Shortest Job First prioritization to reduce the lead time for analytics requests from 5 months to 3 weeks
Program Specialist – Global eCommerce PMO
Staples
- Project member for the buildout of design.staples.com, a major new copy & print platform replacing several vendor-operated white-label sites
- Played a variety of roles interfacing with inside sales and customer service staff, in-store Copy & Print associates, the PNI Media production team, and Staples Premedia Services to manage the transition and build out the collection of artwork templates for the new site
Industry experience
See where this freelancer has spent most of their professional time.
Experienced in Retail, Fashion, Sport, and Information Technology.
Business area experience
See which departments and functions this freelancer has contributed to most.
Experienced in Information Technology, Project Management, Operations, Business Intelligence, Customer Service, and Sales.
Summary
Principal technology operations leader with wide-ranging experience across product management, engineering, tooling and enterprise IT. Specialized in making sense of high-ambiguity, low-maturity environments and creating capabilities where none currently exist.
A hands-on player-coach comfortable with both high-level strategy and low-level execution through direct access to code and consoles. Cool under pressure and no stranger to firefighting with major revenue losses on the line.
Languages
Education
Middlebury College
Bachelor of Arts · Geography · Middlebury, United States
Statistics
Experience
Global experience
Expertise
Qualifications
Profile
Frequently asked questions
Have questions? Find more information here.
Michael is based in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
Michael speaks the following languages: German (Advanced), English (Advanced).
Michael has at least 12 years of experience. During this time, Michael has worked in at least 6 different roles and for 3 different companies. The average length of individual experience is 2 years and 11 months. Note that Michael may not have shared all experience and actually has more experience.
Based on recent experience, Michael would be well-suited for roles such as: Lead Global eCommerce Operations, Senior DevOps Manager, Global eCommerce, Manager – eCommerce Site Operations.
Michael's most recent position is Lead Global eCommerce Operations at PUMAGroup.
In recent years, Michael has worked for PUMAGroup.
Michael is most experienced in industries like Retail, Fashion, and Information Technology. Michael also has some experience in Sport.
Michael is most experienced in business areas like Information Technology, Project Management, and Operations. Michael also has some experience in Business Intelligence, Customer Service, and Sales.
Michael has recently worked in industries like Retail, Fashion, and Sport.
Michael has recently worked in business areas like Information Technology, Operations, and Project Management.
Michael holds a Bachelor in Geography from Middlebury College.
Michael will be available from September 2026.
Daily rate distribution
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The median daily rate is the middle value of all daily rates — half of comparable freelancers charge less, half charge more. Unlike the average, it is barely affected by outliers.
Calculated based on our freelancers’ daily rates as of 26 Aug 2026. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.
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