Michael Schmatz

Work History

• Engineer at the UK AI Safety Institute

  July 2024 - Present

  I work on the Cybersecurity and Autonomous Systems Team (CAST) on evaluations. I have been involved in several pre-deployment tests, including those for the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and o1.

• Principal Engineer at CodeCombat

  May 2022 - July 2024

  I worked as CodeCombat's principal engineer on a variety of educational products in partnership with Roblox, primarily CodeCombat Worlds. For that project, I developed a lot of the infrastructure, such as the core engine, the level editor, code editor, and creative mode.

  I also worked at CodeCombat from January to August 2014 as the first employee, during which time I worked on various parts of the website and infra. That was a fun time, and included meeting with the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler about net neutrality after writing a comment and getting confronted by Sam Altman after sneaking into a YC dinner. Good times.

• Staff Software Engineer, Meta Platforms

  May 2016 - May 2022

  I most recently worked as a staff software engineer in Meta Infrastructure on the Web Foundation team, which is responsible for keeping the Facebook family of products running smoothly. My favorite accomplishment was root causing a total outage of Meta's family of products.

  Before that, I worked on the Information Tools team where I led the team responsible for Facebook's internal tools infrastructure that all Meta employees depended on to do their jobs.

  Finally, before that, I built tools for Facebook's advertiser support, primarily call center interfaces. In that role, I wrote the first Messenger client in GraphQL/React/Relay back in 2016.

  I also did an internship at Facebook in the summer of 2015 on the TAO team doing networking optimizations.

• Engineer at Segment

  August 2015 - April 2016

  I had a brief stint at Segment as an engineer on the infrastructure team, building distributed systems in Go and AWS.

• Instructional Assistant, EECS 482: Operating Systems

  January 2015 - April 2015

  I was an instructional assistant for the University of Michigan's operating systems course during the winter of 2015.

• Intern, Nemaload

  May 2013 - August 2013

  I was an intern on a science project called Nemaload led by David Dalrymple. The goal of this project was to model the functioning of the nervous system of the C. elegans nematode worm. My role on the project was to develop a visualization platform for the imagery, which I did with Meteor and AWS. I also got my first exposure to the Go programming language. This project was not successful, but it was a fun experience and I ended up meeting Nick Winter, which shaped my career considerably.