Matthew Polak

+1 (519) 362-9413 · Ontario, Canada · me@matteopolak.com · matteopolak.com · github.com/matteopolak · linkedin.com/in/matteo-polak

Experience

Software Engineer Intern Microsoft AI
Redmond, WA –
Software Engineer Intern Shopify
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Integrated location management and purchase-order capabilities into Shopify's AI assistant, expanding the assistant's tool-calling workflows used by thousands of merchants.
  • Implemented an async preview mechanism for Shopify's AI assistant platform, powering complex preview workflows and serving as a widely adopted foundational component across teams.
  • Created multiple GraphQL mutations and resolvers with Ruby for the new Purchase Orders experience.
  • Fixed a bug in the Shopify mobile app affecting 30% of merchant workflows and presented findings to 50 engineers.
Software Engineer Intern Solace
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Integrated Storybook and Cypress, improving component correctness and reducing flaky tests by 20%.
  • Added concurrency-based rate limiting (Java, Spring Boot) to a customer-facing API, eliminating noisy-neighbor degradation and stabilizing cluster latency.
  • Created a GitHub Action to diff OpenAPI specifications, catching breaking changes automatically and improving documentation accuracy.
Software Engineer Intern Ciena
Ottawa, ON, Canada –
  • Built a code ownership system with Express.js, MongoDB, and InfluxDB, reducing review turnaround time by 40% and increasing test coverage from 20% to 36%.
  • Developed an on-demand compute booking platform with Nuxt, PostgreSQL, and tRPC, reducing provisioning time from days or weeks to minutes (over 99% faster).
  • Implemented a high-throughput error-classification microservice in Rust 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