Michael Plunkett
Lead Data Engineer
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Plunkett is a Lead Data Engineer based in Chicago with 11 years of experience designing and operating data platforms, pipelines, and backend services across startups, government, and enterprise environments. He has driven large-scale migrations (Postgres to Apache Iceberg), optimized massive relational workloads with materialized views and partitioning, and built secure FastAPI services with SAML auth for federal clients. Comfortable in both systems and product code, he has shipped infrastructure and features in Go, Python/PySpark, and cloud-native stacks (AWS/GCP), and previously led a team that scaled a newsroom data department and visualization platform. Michael brings a pragmatic blend of hands-on engineering and team leadership—he hires, mentors, and removes blockers to help teammates succeed—and has a background in bioinformatics and computational policy that surfaces in his attention to reproducible pipelines and data provenance.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Microbiology General, Bachelor of Science - BS Microbiology General at The University of Texas at AustinMaster of Science - MS Computational Analysis and Public Policy, Master of Science - MS Computational Analysis and Public Policy at University of ChicagoMaster of Arts - MA Biology Bioinformatics, Master of Arts - MA Biology Bioinformatics at University of North Texas
English
Github Skills (67)
python10
npm-package10
edtech10
xgboost-classifier10
validation10
dates10
database10
endpoint-security10
census10
nodejs10
incident-response10
community-management10
parse10
smart-table10
validate10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
michplunkett/ucpd-incident-scraper
Jul 2023 - Mar 2025
This code is going to be used to scrape the UCPD Daily Incident page at a pre-determined frequency and store the incidents on a generic JSON data-store.
Contributions:21 releases, 8 reviews, 96 PRs in 1 year 7 months
gcppolicepolice-datapythonwebscraping
bellingcat/auto-archiver-api
Feb 2025 - Apr 2025
API to manage users/sheets/URLs and call the auto-archiver in dedicated workers.
Contributions:54 reviews, 27 PRs, 163 pushes in 1 month
celerydigital-preservationfastapiweb-archiving
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