Michelle 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
Contributions: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.
A database backed job scheduler for Django RQ and RQ Scheduler
Contributions:6 PRs, 3 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 8 months
pythonrq-schedulerdjangoschedulerjob
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.