Matthew Polak

+1 (519) 362-9413 · Ontario, Canada · [email protected] · matteopolak.com · github.com/matteopolak · linkedin.com/in/matteo-polak

Experience

Software Engineer Intern Microsoft AI
Redmond, WA –
  • Integrated a headless browser into the evaluation pipeline, enabling automated browser-use testing for Cowork's web agent.
  • Root-caused and fixed two production segfaults in the Cowork agent loop causing dozens of container crashes per day.
  • Proposed and shipped core evaluation-pipeline improvements — a standardized judge, unified case format, and dashboard — adopted as team standards.
  • Ran side-by-side evaluations of a major new product extension, delivering the data that drove the go/no-go release decision.
Software Engineer Intern Shopify
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • 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 –
  • 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.
  • Automated OpenAPI breaking-change detection in CI, preventing regressions from reaching downstream consumers by gating merges on schema diffs.
Software Engineer Intern Ciena
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • 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.

Projects

3D Game Engine Rust, WGSL, wgpu, TCP
matteopolak/ira
  • 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 Svelte, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, tRPC, Drizzle, PyTorch
matteopolak/crave
  • 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 C++, LLVM, Bazel
matteopolak/owl
  • 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: 3.9 –

Skills

Languages
Rust, TypeScript, Go, Python, C++, C, Java, JavaScript, Svelte, Vue
Libraries
React, SvelteKit, Express.js, Django, Flask, OpenAPI, Swagger, Protobuf, PyTorch
Tools
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, InfluxDB, Ansible, AWS, GCP, OpenStack, Docker, Observe, OpenTelemetry

Achievements