Michael Schmitz
Director Of Engineering at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Schmitz is a Director of Engineering with 15 years of experience building infrastructure and software to accelerate AI research, currently leading engineering efforts at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. He moved from hands-on technical work—helping build Aristo and managing Semantic Scholar—to directing teams that modernize infrastructure with Kubernetes and streamline deep learning experiments on PyTorch. A methodical backend engineer by training, he has meaningful open-source contributions to prominent Scala projects like scalaz and Twitter's chill, plus practical DevOps work in AllenNLP that includes Docker and Kubernetes configs. His background mixes academic research (University of Washington Open IE and PanImages) with industry product work (image-similarity search at eBay), giving him a rare fluency across research codebases and production systems. Colleagues rely on him to turn experimental research prototypes into reproducible, scalable services and to instill engineering rigor across growing teams. He pairs a strong foundation in computer science and mathematics with a knack for improving reliability and developer velocity in AI-first organizations.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Cum Laude Computer Science and Mathematics, B.S. Cum Laude Computer Science and Mathematics at University of WashingtonEverett High School
Spanish, German
Github Skills (31)
pytorch10
python10
testing10
data-serialization10
data-structure10
java10
scala10
serialization10
javas10
kryo10
data-structures10
functional-programming10
refactoring10
functional-programming-language10
architecture9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
knowitall/reverb
Apr 2011 - Mar 2019
Web-Scale Open Information Extraction
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:117 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the codebase by refactoring and optimizing existing Java code. This included moving initializations into constructors to improve code structure and maintainability within `BracketsRemover` and `JunkRemover` classes. Additionally, the user added a null check to `getSubSequence` function in the `BIOLayeredSequence` class, which improved the robustness and stability of the code. The user was also involved in creating an abstract superclass for `ReVerbRelationExtractor` to allow for extension of the codebase by `ArgLearner`.
nlpextractionopen-information-extractioncorpus-linguisticsmachine-learning
allenai/allennlp
May 2017 - Dec 2021
An open-source NLP research library, built on PyTorch.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:12 releases, 5 reviews, 325 commits in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the AllenNLP library by enhancing code comments, refactoring code, and resolving typos. They integrated PyTorch using conda and made changes to the vocabulary handling logic. Additionally, the user contributed to the project's infrastructure by adding and modifying Dockerfiles and setting environment configurations, specifically for CPU and GPU support, and also included a Kubernetes configuration file. They also implemented a command-line interface to serve a web service.
nlppytorchtransformerspythonbert
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