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 –
  • Doubled GDPval-AA task completion scores from 40% to 80% for Copilot Cowork and Copilot Tasks by diagnosing eval quality gaps and improving prompt and workflow coverage.
  • Diagnosed intermittent failures in the eval infrastructure and reduced run failure rate by 70% by distributing execution across time windows to eliminate resource contention.
  • Built an internal leaderboard to surface Copilot eval score trends across model versions, system prompts, and skills, enabling the team to catch capability regressions before they reach production.
Software Engineer Intern Shopify
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Unlocked location management and purchase-order capabilities for thousands of merchants by integrating new tool-calling workflows into Shopify's AI assistant.
  • Designed and implemented an async preview mechanism for Shopify's AI assistant platform, unblocking complex multi-step preview workflows that were previously unsupported and adopted as a foundational primitive across teams.
  • Identified and fixed a critical bug silently breaking 30% of merchant workflows in the Shopify mobile app, then presented the root cause analysis to 50 engineers to prevent similar regressions.
Software Engineer Intern Solace
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Designed and implemented concurrency-based rate limiting in Java and Spring Boot for a customer-facing API, eliminating noisy-neighbor interference that was causing unpredictable latency spikes across the cluster.
  • Automated breaking-change detection for OpenAPI specifications with a GitHub Action, preventing undocumented API regressions from reaching production by gating merges on spec diffs.
Software Engineer Intern Ciena
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Built a Rust error-classification microservice processing millions of log lines daily, reducing MTTR by 30%.

Projects

3D Game Engine Rust, WGSL, wgpu, TCP
matteopolak/ira
  • Built a 3D game engine with a custom wgpu-based rendering pipeline and shaders, maintaining 200+ FPS on typical Blender-scale scenes.
  • Implemented instancing, batching, and culling to simulate 100k+ objects with real-time physics.
Recipe-sharing Platform Svelte, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, tRPC, Drizzle, PyTorch
matteopolak/crave
  • Launched a recipe-sharing platform with 100+ users and personalized recommendations from a 1M-recipe embedding dataset.
  • Built a PyTorch + Flask vector-ranking pipeline using inner-product similarity.
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