Marcin Szczodrak
CEO at Refract Systems
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMarcin Szczodrak is a Principal engineer and founder based in Sunnyvale with 13 years building deterministic cyber-physical systems and embedded AI for edge devices. He founded Refract Systems to create cycle-accurate digital twins that let teams run embedded firmware and physical environment models concurrently, cutting BOM costs and hardware iterations. His background spans Google Brain robotics, Nest/Google hardware, Tesla energy and wireless charging, and X, where he led low-latency real-time control, distributed embedded systems, and on-edge ML. A long-time contributor to OpenThread, he has deep hands-on expertise in radio/FSM design and making production-quality IoT networking stacks. Marcin combines academic rigor (Columbia PhD work on distributed wireless sensor networks) with product-first engineering, often bridging simulation, virtualization, and low-level firmware. Colleagues rely on him to translate research-grade controls and RL into deployable, safety-conscious embedded architectures.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, Computer Science, Master’s Degree, Computer Science at The City College of New YorkBachelor’s Degree, Computer Information Systems, minor in Mathematics, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Information Systems, minor in Mathematics at John Jay College (CUNY)Computer Science, Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Columbia University
English, Polish
Github Skills (14)
ieee10
openthread10
iot10
embedded10
wireless10
fm-radio10
sys10
cprogramming-language9
network-protocol9
protocols9
c-language9
c178
c118
git5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
openthread/openthread
May 2016 - Jun 2018
OpenThread released by Google is an open-source implementation of the Thread networking protocol
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:42 commits, 52 PRs, 254 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Marcin primarily contributed to the OpenThread codebase, focusing on improvements and fixes related to the radio and network functionalities. Their work involved adjusting code for license text width, resolving compilation issues, and addressing problems within the examples platform. The user also worked on restructuring apps, platforms, and removing outdated function calls, indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability. Finally, they introduced the new radio FSM and TX/RX packet dump options, further highlighting their involvement with low-level radio operations.
networkingopenthreadiotgooglenest
RefractSystems/virtmcu
Apr 2026 - Jun 2026
Contributions:22 PRs, 636 pushes, 95 branches in 2 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.