Ten years across private equity, retail, and asset management. Real technical experience covering infrastructure, cloud, security, and trading systems. Written plainly to help other engineers navigate this world.
// Senior Systems Engineer · Boston, MA · Online as sys.ghost
I have spent over a decade building and maintaining infrastructure at the intersection of technology and financial services. My career has taken me through three distinct sectors of the industry — technology, private equity, and asset management — and each one changed how I think about the work.
I started in general IT, which is where most engineers who didn't go straight into software end up. Data centers, networking, on-call rotations, cable management. The kind of work that teaches you that almost every sophisticated system is, one layer down, a collection of unglamorous fundamentals that either hold or don't. I learned to take those fundamentals seriously, which turned out to be the most useful thing I've ever done professionally.
Private equity came next, and it was a different world. The infrastructure stakes there are less about uptime and more about data integrity and information security. When deal teams are making acquisition decisions based on data you're responsible for, and when a due diligence process has a hard deadline that does not move regardless of what broke overnight, your relationship with reliability changes. I survived several due diligence seasons, built and migrated portfolio monitoring infrastructure, and developed a healthy paranoia about data pipelines that I still carry today.
For the past several years I've been in asset management, supporting trading and investment operations infrastructure. This is the environment I find most technically interesting. The compliance requirements are demanding, the legacy systems have long institutional memories, and the tolerance for operational errors is genuinely low — not just in terms of business impact, but in terms of regulatory consequence. When markets are open, there is no "we'll fix it after the weekend." The infrastructure has to work, and when it doesn't, the communication and recovery process is a discipline of its own.
I started Packet & Profit in January 2026 because I kept looking for the kind of writing I wanted to read and finding that it mostly didn't exist. There's a lot of content for engineers online. There is much less written by engineers working specifically inside regulated financial services firms, being honest about what that actually looks like. The compliance conversations, the legacy constraints, the incident management in front of stakeholders who measure downtime in dollars per minute — that's what I write about here.
Everything on this site comes from direct professional experience. I don't write about things I haven't done, haven't operated, or haven't watched fail at 3am. Where I describe specific configurations or commands, I'm drawing on real systems. Where I describe incidents, the details are anonymised but the dynamics are real.
What I Write About
⚙️
Infrastructure & Operations
Kubernetes, OpenShift, PostgreSQL replication, Linux hardening, monitoring stacks. Real configurations and real trade-offs, not vendor marketing copy.
📊
Finance Tech
What it's actually like to run infrastructure inside a regulated investment firm. T+1 settlement pressures, compliance tooling, trading system architecture, and the gap between industry reports and ground truth.
🧭
Career & Craft
Navigating the engineer-to-finance career path. How to write post-mortems that actually improve systems. Incident communication when the audience includes lawyers and compliance officers.
My Stack
RHEL / Ubuntu
Kubernetes
OpenShift
Terraform
Ansible
Prometheus
Grafana
Python / Bash
AWS / Azure
Cisco / Palo Alto
PostgreSQL
Redis
HashiCorp Vault
Fluent Bit
Helm
ArgoCD
Certifications & Training
✓Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
✓Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
✓AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
✓CompTIA Security+
✓HashiCorp Vault Associate
Career Journey
2022 – Present
Senior Systems Engineer — Asset Management, Boston MA
Leading infrastructure for trading operations and investment management systems. Responsibilities span network security, cloud migration strategy, Kubernetes platform engineering, and incident management. Deeply involved in T+1 settlement infrastructure modernisation and the shift from overnight batch processing to near-real-time event-driven architecture.
2018 – 2022
Systems Engineer — Private Equity, Boston MA
Built and maintained data infrastructure supporting deal teams, portfolio monitoring, and investor reporting. Managed infrastructure through multiple due diligence cycles with hard deadlines and high data integrity requirements. Led a major data platform migration from on-premises to cloud-hosted infrastructure, including security controls satisfying LP and regulatory requirements.
2015 – 2018
Infrastructure Engineer — Retail Technology
Supported inventory management, real-time pricing, and supply chain integration systems across a high-SKU retail environment. Operated under peak load conditions that made "scale" a concrete engineering problem rather than an abstract one. Built out monitoring and alerting infrastructure from scratch and managed a full data center relocation.
2013 – 2015
IT Engineer — Technology Sector
Established the professional fundamentals: data center operations, network infrastructure, endpoint management, and the on-call rotations that teach you more about system fragility than any textbook. Developed an appreciation for cable labeling that has never left me.
Get in Touch
If you're an engineer working in financial services, curious about the career path, or have a question about something I've written — I'd genuinely like to hear from you. I read and respond to everything sent through the . If something I've written has been useful to you, a coffee is always appreciated.
A note on anonymity: I write under my own name but keep my employer and specific firm details private. The financial services industry is small, the regulatory environment is real, and I want to be able to write honestly without those constraints. All incidents and case studies described on this site are anonymised. The technical content is real; the identifying details are not.
Get in touch
Contact
Whether you are an engineer in financial services, have a question about something I have written, or just want to say hello - feel free to reach out. I read everything.
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Last updated: April 2026
Packet & Profit is a personal blog written by Michael Harlow, a Systems Engineer based in Boston, MA. The views expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent those of any employer, client, or organisation he is affiliated with.
Not Financial or Investment Advice
This site discusses financial services technology, investment management infrastructure, and related engineering topics from a technical practitioner's perspective. Nothing published here is financial advice, investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, asset, or financial instrument. The author is not a registered financial adviser, broker, or investment professional.
Content that references financial markets, trading systems, or investment firms is provided for technical and educational context only. Any figures, case studies, or examples are illustrative and should not be relied upon for financial decisions.
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Nothing on this site constitutes legal, compliance, regulatory, or professional advice. Readers should consult qualified professionals for advice specific to their circumstances.
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Posts on this site draw on the author's professional experience in systems engineering across private equity, retail technology, and asset management. Specific details about employers, clients, projects, and colleagues have been anonymised or generalised. Any resemblance to specific organisations is incidental.
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