Michael Sullivan
Software Engineer at Vercel
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Sullivan is a senior software engineer with 15 years of experience building compilers, databases, and high-performance back-end systems, currently at Vercel after leading the compiler team at Gel Data. He architected Gel’s query compiler that translates a custom query language into SQL and built migration tooling for a Postgres-backed graph-relational database, work that helped drive Gel’s acquisition. A longtime contributor to major open-source projects—including CPython, Rust concurrency libraries, Facebook’s Flow, Dropbox’s pyannotate, and Black—he has deep expertise in type systems, compiler toolchains, and memory-safe concurrent programming. His contributions range from low-level performance fixes in the Python runtime to concurrency and garbage-collection fixes in Rust, demonstrating both systems-level rigor and practical product impact. Based in San Francisco, he blends research pedigree (PhD-level CS work) with hands-on engineering leadership and a knack for turning language and type-system research into robust production compilers and developer tools.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (53)
static-typing10
typesc10
parser10
postgresql10
python10
back-end-development10
stub10
stubs10
abstract-syntax-tree10
atomics10
testing10
mypy10
dynamic-typing10
memory-management10
query-optimization10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
mypyc/mypyc
Mar 2018 - Aug 2019
Compile type annotated Python to fast C extensions
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:409 commits, 559 PRs, 646 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the core logic of the project by updating and modifying existing tests. These changes involved adapting the tests to the newest versions of the MyPy library, which includes adjusting the code to match the tests against more recent versions of MyPy. The code changes indicate focus on the underlying compiler features of the project.
mypystatic-typingpythontype-safetytypechecker
geldata/gel
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
A graph-relational database with declarative schema, built-in migration system, and a next-generation query language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer and Database Engineer
Back-end Developer and Database EngineerContributions:7 releases, 1750 reviews, 1128 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the back-end development of Gel, with a focus on improving database interactions and SQL functionality. Their work involved fixing output formatting issues in JSON lines/pretty mode and addressing an optional scoping bug related to access policy implications, which indicates direct involvement in complex query processing and optimization. Additionally, they contributed by adding SQL functions to the backend, and improving the performance of functions, showcasing a strong understanding of SQL.
rdbmsedgedbgraph-relationalormrelational
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