Michael Chang

over 10 years of experience building production apps (Python, Go, C++)
michael-chang.ca | linkedin.com/in/m9chang | m9chang@gmail.com | (365) 386-4833

Work Experience

Backend Lead

Backend team

Flybits

Toronto, ON, Canada

Sept 2025 – Present

Co-maintained 60+ Go/PostgreSQL/MongoDB microservices backing the Flybits platform
Kept the team on track to ship features for onboarding a customer with 500k+ users
Advised on designs and requirements for upgrades to a merchant-funded offers solution
Interviewed and hired one developer and one co-op student

Member of Technical Staff

Startup

Stealth

San Francisco, CA

Apr 2025 – Jul 2025

Worked with Cursor, Gemini Flash, Go, Cloud Run, GCS, Spanner, Firebase, iOS/Swift

Software Engineer

Startup

Fractional AI

San Francisco, CA

Aug 2024 – Jan 2025

Built a pipeline to retrieve PDFs and parts in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, add them to vector stores in OpenAI and Pinecone for RAG
Implemented proof-of-concept that used gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini to classify PDF documents, including evals using Braintrust

Software Engineer

Main App team

YouTube

San Bruno, CA

Jun 2020 – Jul 2024

Improved performance (low-end) and reach (high-end) of certain features in the YouTube app using device performance data
Added dimensions and metrics to the data warehouse to measure impact
Wrote hooks for round-tripping device performance data between microservices
Advised other teams on how to optimize their features based on device performance

Software Engineer

Video Editor team

YouTube

San Bruno, CA

Apr 2014 – May 2020

Integrated Mediapipe into server-side Editor service (C++)
- Co-wrote pairs of operators (Calculators) for phone GPUs and server CPUs
- Authored initial effects graphs, including selfie segmentation / background blur
Various migrations: added column to database table primary key, static workflows to in-house Go / Golang framework, Python middleware to C++, MySQL to Spanner

Awards

3rd Place, Make Impacts AI Hackathon

2025

Used the Replicate API, generative image-to-image models, Cloudflare Workers + D1, and TypeScript to build an app where you upload a selfie and it turns you into a witch/wizard. Interactive, working live demo where I asked audience members to upload selfies to try it. Handled dozens of concurrent requests without falling over.

Judge's Choice Award (FTC Team 3431)

2009

I was the lead programmer on our high-school robotics team, leading a team of three programmers. Collaborated with teammates iterating on hardware robot designs, and incorporated feedback from our team's drivers into the robot's control software.

This award qualified our team for the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championships in Atlanta.

Bronze medal, Canadian Computing Competition

2009

I was one of twenty students selected to participate in Stage 2, which is used to select the Canadian team in the International Olympiad in Informatics(IOI).

Education

Bachelor of Software Engineering

University of Waterloo

2009 – 2014

Co-op terms at Facebook and YouTube as well as in startups, mobile, and ed-tech