# Dakota McDaniels

> AI @ Robinhood

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/dakotamcdaniels

## Work Experience
### ML/AI Software Engineer @ Robinhood
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Menlo Park, California, United States

### Co-Founder and COO/CTO (Acq. by $HOOD) @ Pluto
Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Los Angeles, California, United States
Fundraising and Leadership:
∗ Raised $5M in VC funding to build and scale Pluto’s AI financial advisory product.
∗ Scaled the technology and team to support 25,000 users and over $40M in tracked assets.
∗ Conducted 100+ interviews after sourcing candidates from AngelList, recruiters, and inbound applications. 
∗ Hired a team of 3 engineers and product designers.

Infrastructure and Cloud Computing:
∗ Architected and deployed 50+ K8s microservices and cron jobs alongside CI/CD with CircleCI.
∗ Managed a 30 node Kubernetes cluster with over 1TB of RAM to support a 10,000 pod workload.
∗ Built an order management system to process 12.5M trading decisions every hour using Kafka.
∗ Achieved 99.99% system uptime through comprehensive monitoring and observability.
∗ Engineered a high-performance database architecture using MongoDB and Redis, which supported ultra-high transaction volumes of 100+ million per month with average latency under 10ms.

Product Management and AI Innovation:
∗ Single-handedly streamlined the entire brokerage integration process to operational readiness in just 14 days – covering payment rails, KYC, order management, and compliance – shattering the typical 6-month timeline for a traditional team of 10.
∗ Overhauled the user onboarding experience, simplifying KYC and deposit/withdrawal processes, which increased user conversion rates by 30%.
∗ Introduced the first AI financial assistant that uses advanced NLP techniques like CoT, RAG, and ReAct to provide accurate and contextually relevant responses to user queries.
∗ Implemented measures to reduce irrelevant or inconsistent responses by 90%, significantly improving user experience and engagement.
∗ Pioneered an AI-powered UI that generates real-time charts and insights based on user prompts for a wide range of financial topics, from individual stock performance to market trends.

### Cyber Security Engineer @ Lowe's Companies, Inc.
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Mooresville, North Carolina, United States
◦ Published minimum security baselines for 180,000+ instances including operating systems, applications, and PCI-DSS compliant devices.
◦ Designed security baselines for multiple Linux distros, NoSQL databases, NGINX, and PostgREST.
◦ Led security compliance monitoring across a 70-team organization through routine reporting and notifications.

### Information Security Analyst @ Lowe's Companies, Inc.
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Mooresville, North Carolina, United States

### Undergraduate Research in Cyber Security @ Office of Naval Research
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020
◦ Researched DDoS attack mitigation using Palo Alto’s next-generation firewalls.
◦ Developed training materials for CI engineers on high-throughput, low-latency network environments.
◦ Awarded part of the $499,959.00 grant for ”Cyberinfrastructure Expertise on High-throughput Networks for Big Science Data Transfers” (NSF 1829698).

### Network Security Engineer @ University of South Carolina
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Columbia, South Carolina Area
◦ Supervised and mentored nine Computer Science interns, directing project workflows over six months.
◦ Resolved 445 network and security incidents, accounting for 42.5% of the internship program’s total output.
◦ Managed network infrastructure with over 850 switches and 4,100 access points across the campus using industry-standard tools like SolarWinds, Cisco, and Aruba ClearPass.

### Computer Technician @ Carolina Tech Zone
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Columbia, South Carolina Area


## Education
### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science
University of South Carolina


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dakota-mcdaniels

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Source: https://flows.cv/dakotamcdaniels
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/dakotamcdaniels/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-29