Michael McCandless
Lexington, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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RockstarMike Mccandless is a senior principal product search developer with 19 years of experience, currently shaping search experiences at Amazon from his base in Lexington, MA. He is a long-standing Apache Lucene committer and PMC member and an Apache Software Foundation member, bringing deep expertise in search engine internals and indexing performance. His open-source work includes notable contributions to Apache Lucene and Apache Tika—improving core search logic, timing and flush metrics, and strengthening RTF parsing and encoding robustness. Known for tinkering with search engines (and electricity), he blends hands-on backend engineering and test automation to deliver reliable, high-performance search systems at scale.
19 years of coding experience
Github Skills (12)
content-extraction10
lucene10
javas10
query-optimization10
optimisation10
java10
optimization10
database-optimization10
testing10
metadata9
code-optimization9
documentation8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Mar 2021 - May 2026
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:739 reviews, 148 PRs, 190 pushes in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael appears to have been actively working on the core logic of the Apache Lucene search engine. They have contributed to the codebase by fixing compilation errors and improving the javadocs. In addition, they added functionality for measuring the time taken for parts of an index to be flushed.
lucenesearchnosqljavabackend
apache/tika
Aug 2011 - May 2015
The Apache Tika toolkit detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF).
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:98 commits in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to enhancing the Apache Tika toolkit by adding and modifying RTF parser test cases. They implemented new test cases to cover various scenarios, including RTF hex escapes, Windows codepage 1250, and table cell separation. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to character encoding by implementing Unicode escapes. Their work focused on improving the robustness and accuracy of RTF parsing within the Tika project.
apache-tikapdfjavatikametadata
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