01

Matthew Polak

Ontario, Canada

Experience

Software Engineer Intern

Microsoft AI (within Microsoft)
Redmond, WA
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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

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 4.0
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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