Résumé

Mikel Mcdaniel

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikel-mcdaniel-14ba74164

I'm a Software Engineer / Data Scientist with 10+ years of professional experience. My most successful projects usually start with a vague problem the business needs to solve, lead to interesting data analysis, then an experiment, and finally end with a new feature/service and some documented results.

Skills and Environment

Strong languages: Python, C++, SQL
Comfortable languages: BASH, Java, JavaScript, WebGL (OpenGL ES), Golang
Version Control: Git, Perforce, SVN
Frameworks / Other: GitHub, numpy, pandas, OpenCV, Arduino, Linux, Docker, Flask, CSS, WireShark, FlowBlade, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, marimo

Education

Master's Degree, Computer Science -- September 2012 -- May 2013
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
GPA 3.75
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science -- August 2009 -- June 2012
University of California--Davis, Davis, CA
Completed 4 year degree in 3 years
GPA 3.45

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer / Data Scientist June 2025 -- Present

(A Redacted Cyber Security Company), Remote

(Redacted for privacy; happy to chat)
Work related to automated AI systems for finding and patching vulnerabilities.

Senior Software Engineer / Data Scientist February 2022 -- December 2024

OfferUp, Bellevue, WA

Ads projects leveraging machine learning and statistical methods from proposal through design, implementation, and delegation
- Collaborated with other teams to improve revenue monitoring accuracy by ~10%
- Increased ads relevance and revenue by ~14% by leveraging semantic search and statistical models
Mentorship within Data Science and Ads teams

Adjunct Faculty (Computer Science) January 2016 -- June 2022

Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA

Taught Object Oriented Programming in C++ (3x) and Java (1x)
Taught Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ (5x)
Wrote and used GradeOven to automatically grade programming assignments with instant interactive feedback

Volunteer Software Engineer September, 2021 -- January, 2022

Recidiviz, Remote

Fixed bugs in prison population projection modeling to support projections with multiple legal policies
Discovered and reported correctness bugs and add unit tests
Vectorized prison population projection pipeline and reduced wall-clock-time by 20x, using pyinstrument and cProfile to identify bottlenecks

Software Engineer (SRE) July 2013 -- April 2021

Google, Mountain View, CA

Led SRE orientation for Australia and west-coast USA for 1.5 years
Built SSD cache analysis pipeline and saved 10's of petabytes of SSD
Member of oncall team for multi-million QPS/multi-petabyte scale storage systems (Kansas, Sawmill/ULS)
Consulted for internal Google-internal teams
Reviewed Practical Alerting chapter of Google SRE Book

Intro to Programming Instructor April -- May 2014

Davis Roots, Davis, CA

Taught introductory programming to 11 students of various ages, backgrounds, and interests
Created lessons, homework, and gave 1:1 mentorship

Software Engineer Intern Summer 2012

RapLeaf / LiveRamp, San Francisco, CA

Consolidated HadoopFS-based stores to conserve space and decrease query times
Developed Cascading (MapReduce) jobs to build datastores and collect statistics
Researched experimental techniques for data inference

Software Engineer Intern June 2010 -- June 2011 & Summer 2013

CACE Technologies / Riverbed Technologies, Davis, CA

Developed and tested software for server-side of a large packet-sniffer
Designed algorithms for TCP/IP packet data extraction
Ported open-source software (WireShark)

Personal Projects

GradeOven
Single-server web server for compiling and running untrusted student code, with customizable HTML output per assignment submission.
Completed over 150 ProjectEuler.net problems
Collection of math and programming challenges, ranging wildy in difficulty. Most problems involve number theory and/or dynamic programming.
Automated drawing on Sketchful.io Sketchful is a pictionary-type game where players draw a word and others guess. My program took a prompt as input, looked up an image of that prompt, then drew it using Sketchful's limited drawing tools.
Patched Snes9x, an Open-Source Super Nintendo emulator
The Super Nintendo draws in 2 to 4 distinct layers; my patch draws each layer with a progressively larger horizontal separation in red and blue, giving a 3D effect.
Simple Compiler in Python
Written in Python from the ground up, the compiler converts a very simple LiSP-like language to a stack-based assembly languages and then to BrainF***, an esoteric language similar to a Turing Machine.