Michelle Pokrass
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichelle Pokrass is a seasoned software engineer with 11 years of experience building backend systems at high-growth tech companies, currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI in San Francisco. Her career spans senior roles at Clubhouse and Coinbase and internships at Stripe and Google, reflecting deep experience in scalable infrastructure, reliability, and developer-facing APIs. She contributes to prominent open-source projects, including meaningful back-end enhancements to the official openai-python library—fixing dependency issues, improving authentication for audio resources, and tightening error handling. A Waterloo BCS graduate with a 3.95 GPA, she combines rigorous academic foundations with pragmatic production engineering. Colleagues would describe her as someone who quietly drives consistency and polish in libraries and systems that many teams rely on.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computer Science, 3.95 GPA, Bachelor of Computer Science, 3.95 GPA at University of Waterloo
English, Russian
Github Skills (7)
version-control10
api10
openai10
apidoc10
python10
lib9
testing8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
openai/openai-python
Sep 2022 - Nov 2022
The official Python library for the OpenAI API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 9 reviews, 3 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Michelle made multiple contributions to the OpenAI Python library, focusing on feature enhancements, bug fixes, and version updates. They addressed missing dependencies in the setup, refactored parts of the API, and renamed features for consistency. Furthermore, the user implemented the use of supplied API keys in the audio resource for better authentication management. The user also bumped the library version multiple times and corrected error messages.
openai-apipythonopenai
mpokrass/django-rq-scheduler
Feb 2018 - Oct 2020
A database backed job scheduler for Django RQ and RQ Scheduler
Contributions:6 PRs, 3 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 8 months
databasedjango-rqjob-scheduler
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