Michael Bilstein
Lead Software Engineer at McMaster-Carr
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Bilstein is an independent software consultant and seasoned engineering leader with a decade of experience designing and shipping full-stack and AI-driven systems, particularly in regulated and high-availability domains. He has founded and scaled startups (raising $1.5M and helping achieve a $37M+ acquisition) and led large engineering organizations to deliver production sportsbook and media products across web and mobile. His recent work centers on LLM-based document processing and automation for financial firms, building OCR + VLLM inference pipelines that normalized tens of thousands of federal cases and achieved over 75% automation coverage. Comfortable across Python, React, Postgres, vector databases, and cloud platforms, he blends hands-on implementation with architecture and compliance strategy. Based in Chicago, he pairs product-focused engineering with a knack for squeezing sub-50ms search performance from large, attribute-rich catalogs.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Purdue University
English, German
Github Skills (12)
cluster-api9
microsoft-azure8
subproject6
operating-system6
javascript4
groupme3
discord-bot2
react-native2
giphy2
zendesk2
ruby1
discord1
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Meegul/meegul.github.io
Feb 2016 - Oct 2025
Contributions:103 pushes, 1 branch in 9 years 9 months
Meegul/better-particles
Jan 2017 - Feb 2023
Contributions:1 release, 38 pushes, 1 branch in 6 years 2 months
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