---
title: "Portfolio"
description: "Software Engineer with experience at Microsoft, Shopify, and Solace. CS student at University of Ottawa building fast, scalable systems."
url: "https://matteopolak.com/"
---

# Matthew Polak

Software Engineer

> Software Engineer with experience at Microsoft, Shopify, and Solace. CS student at University of Ottawa building fast, scalable systems.

- Location: Ontario, Canada
- [Website](https://matteopolak.com/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/matteopolak)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteo-polak)
- Email: [me@matteopolak.com](mailto:me@matteopolak.com)

## Experience

### Software Engineer Intern, Microsoft AI

*Redmond, WA · May 2026 — Jul 2026*

- Root-caused and fixed **2** production segfaults in the **Cowork** agent loop, eliminating dozens of daily container crashes and restoring runtime stability.
- Proposed and shipped core evaluation-pipeline improvements — a standardized judge, unified case format, and dashboard — adopted as team standards.
- Solely owned **Cowork**'s **gRPC/MCP** integration and **215-task** paired evaluation of a new document backend behind a feature flag; repaired **~10** cases and cut false-negative failures from **~80%** to **1–2%** of failing cases.
- Built and iterated a **React/Vite** evaluation dashboard used by **~20** engineers; presented **189**-vs-**174** results twice to **~12** Distinguished/Principal Engineers, driving backend selection for a new product feature.

### Software Engineer Intern, Shopify

*Ottawa, ON, Canada · Sep 2025 — Dec 2025*

- Shipped new tool-calling workflows in Shopify's AI assistant, enabling thousands of merchants to manage inventory locations and purchase orders conversationally.
- Designed an asynchronous preview primitive for Shopify's AI assistant platform, unblocking multi-step preview flows and now used platform-wide across Shopify.
- Diagnosed and fixed a silent defect breaking 30% of merchant workflows in the Shopify mobile app, then presented the root-cause analysis to 50 engineers to prevent recurrence.

### Software Engineer Intern, Solace

*Ottawa, ON, Canada · Jan 2025 — Apr 2025*

- Built concurrency-based rate limiting in **Java** and **Spring Boot** for a customer-facing API, eliminating noisy-neighbor contention and delivering predictable latency across the cluster.
- Improved throughput of the event broker auditing system by 400%, directly resulting in new customers for their event-driven architecture.

### Software Engineer Intern, Ciena

*Ottawa, ON, Canada · May 2023 — Dec 2024*

- Built a **Rust** log error-classification service processing several TB of production logs daily, reducing mean time to resolution by 30% for on-call engineers.

## Selected work

### [3D Game Engine](https://github.com/matteopolak/ira)

*Rust · WGSL · wgpu · TCP*

- Built a **3D game engine** with a custom wgpu rendering pipeline and shaders, sustaining 200+ FPS on Blender-scale scenes.
- Implemented instancing, batching, and frustum culling to render 100k+ objects with real-time physics.

### [Recipe-sharing Platform](https://github.com/matteopolak/crave)

*Svelte · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · tRPC · Drizzle · PyTorch*

- Launched a **recipe-sharing** platform serving 100+ users with personalized recommendations over a 1M-recipe embedding dataset.
- Built a **PyTorch** and **Flask** vector-ranking pipeline using inner-product similarity search.

### [Compiled Programming Language](https://github.com/matteopolak/owl)

*C++ · LLVM · Bazel*

- Built the **Owl** compiled language with an LLVM backend supporting static single assignment (SSA), constant folding, dead code elimination (DCE), inlining, and loop unrolling, compiling 150k LoC/sec.
- Implemented control flow structures, structs, arrays, pointers, functions, and a static type system for multi-architecture targets.

## Education

### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

*University of Ottawa · GPA 4.0 · Sep 2022 — Dec 2026*

## Skills

- **Languages:** Rust, TypeScript, Go, Python, C++ (20/23/26), Zig, Java, JavaScript
- **AI & Agent Systems:** MCP, A2A, Tool Calling, Agent Evals, Browser Agents, Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot
- **APIs & Protocols:** OpenAPI, Protobuf, GraphQL, WebSockets
- **Platforms & Tooling:** PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, AWS, GCP, OpenTelemetry, LLVM, Bazel

## Achievements

- Open Source Contributor to [Svelte](https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte), [SvelteKit](https://github.com/sveltejs/kit), [Lucia](https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia), [Bitcode](https://github.com/SoftbearStudios/bitcode), and [Plotters](https://github.com/plotters-rs/plotters)
- 1st place: [2025 uOttaHack 7](https://dorahacks.io/buidl/21638/milestones) (850), [2024 NASA Space Apps Ottawa](https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/nasa-space-apps-2024/2024-local-events/ottawa/) (300), [2024 Hack the Hill II](https://devpost.com/software/mound) (1200), [2023 Hack the Hill](https://devpost.com/software/hackthefeed) (600), [2023 MLH x {all in}](https://devpost.com/software/cyberguardian-hbeouf) (1000), and [2023 MapHacks 2](https://devpost.com/software/tbd-p9xqhv) (100)
- Built and designed a decentralized file-sharing system with a custom wire protocol (Hack the Hill II)