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 (53)
community-management10
python10
endpoint-security10
census10
smart-table10
incident-response10
edtech10
usability10
xgboost-classifier10
database10
javascript9
json-data9
webscraping9
cytoscapejs9
data-journalism9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
bellingcat/auto-archiver-api
Feb 2025 - Jul 2025
API to manage users/sheets/URLs and call the auto-archiver in dedicated workers.
Contributions:56 reviews, 28 PRs, 165 pushes in 4 months
celerydigital-preservationfastapiweb-archiving
michplunkett/ucpd-incident-scraper
Jul 2023 - Jun 2026
This repository scrapes the UCPD Daily Incident page at a pre-determined frequency and store the incidents on a generic JSON data-store.
Contributions:21 releases, 10 reviews, 104 PRs in 2 years 11 months
json-datagcppolice-datapolicepython
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