# Melina O'Dell > SWE @ Verkada | CS @ UMich | CS Education Researcher Location: San Mateo, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/melinaodell ## Work Experience ### Design System Engineer @ Verkada Jan 2025 – Present | San Mateo, CA - Modernized critical table, search, filter, and sorting components to unlock React 19 upgrade, accelerating the company-wide upgrade roadmap by 6 months of developer effort - Proposed and led the rewrite of Verkada’s component library documentation using Storybook to define standards and usage patterns in a consistent format, improving developer velocity and reducing questions - Introduced dark mode support across core components and developed a migration pattern and AI automation tools and scripts to accelerate company-wide theme adoption - Developed 3 new core components and refactored 7 existing components in the design system, adopted by 5 product teams with consistently positive feedback on ease of use ### Frontend Software Engineer @ Verkada Jan 2025 – Present | San Mateo, CA - Led the frontend redesign of License Manager using React and TypeScript, enabling $100M in bookings and $100M in pipeline across 250+ enterprise customers; featured in the VerkadaOne keynote - Authored technical specifications and coordinated with Product Management to organize tasks for two senior engineers and deliver on an aggressive founder-set timeline with on-time feature completion ### CSE Master's Student Mentor @ Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 - Supported graduate student success through group mentorship on research, academic development, and career planning - Advised master’s students monthly on professional skill-building and career navigation, drawing on industry and academic experience ### Research Assistant @ Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Developed 6 custom generative AI chatbots with varying scopes of course materials as contextual documents and compared bot performance by the specificity of external knowledge available - Analyzed hallucination and helpfulness rates of bot responses (per scope) with an evaluation by a team of course experts on sample student questions about course projects - Publication: “Specialist vs Generalist AI for Student Learning,” American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2025 ### Web Systems Teaching Assistant (EECS 485) @ Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Lead TA for upper-level web systems course to 2,700+ students over 5 semesters, covering full-stack development (React, Flask, SQL), AWS, REST APIs, search engines, and distributed systems (MapReduce, Hadoop) - Lead weekly lab sections for 30+ students to reinforce lecture material and provide hands-on practice with fundamental web development concepts - Delivered primary lectures to ~100 students in the absence of the professor - Held office hours and moderated an online Piazza forum to offer individual guidance on project requirements and debugging techniques - Designed and tested exam questions to ensure clarity and quality of content evaluation - Maintained course autograder infrastructure by writing unit tests, managing Docker images, and upgrading dependencies to support evolving project requirements - Redesigned course projects including an Instagram clone (React functional components) and search engine (web scraper implementation), adapting curriculum to current industry standards and improving student learning outcomes Leadership Responsibilities: Autograder Admin, Project Lead, eecs485.org Maintainer, Piazza Admin, Recorded Lab Section ### Research Assistant @ Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Developed and deployed a custom generative AI chatbot trained on course materials to a course of 700+ students as a supplemental course resource - Interpreted and analyzed quantitative and qualitative survey results about student experiences and custom chatbot usefulness - Publication: “A Custom Generative AI Chatbot as a Course Resource,” American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2024 - Press: "GenAI in computer science education: Friend or foe?" (UMich CSE) ### Engineering Teaching Consultant @ University of Michigan CRLT in Engineering Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Facilitated training sessions for new teaching assistants - Developed resources for instructors related to appropriate classroom behaviors, inclusive teaching, and engagement techniques ### Software Engineering Intern (Frontend, Core Command/Web Platform) @ Verkada Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | San Mateo, California, United States - Refactored Verkada’s web application initialization endpoint to be lightweight, reducing page load by 90% (60s → 5s) for top customers with 10,000+ IoT devices by eliminating unnecessary data loading - Designed scalable API migration pattern adopted by all 6 product teams, achieving 50-75% latency reduction across critical pages through selective data loading strategy - Refined Datadog instrumentation to accurately measure LCP and real user experience, enabling product teams to prioritize performance improvements with reliable baselines and dashboards - Increased reliability of under-tested, client-facing features and confidence in deployments by writing new end-to-end and unit test suites with Playwright and Jest ### Web Developer @ The Michigan Daily Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Developed special project websites using React, HTML/SCSS, MaterialUI, and AWS services - Created a full-stack interactive voting site for Ann Arbor businesses, visited by 3000+ users/week - Interfaced with Product Design team to clarify UI/UX requirements and meet rapid deadlines ### Engineering Manager @ The Michigan Daily Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Organized and conducted weekly subteam meetings and facilitated cross-team collaboration to ensure clear communication and progress towards project goals - Maintained technical specifications and utilized project management software (Notion) to track development progress and timelines for 5+ projects simultaneously - Supported the Web Team's recruitment efforts by reviewing applications and conducting interviews for the Engineering subteam, starting from a 100+ applicant pool ### Software Engineering Intern (Frontend, Access Control) @ Verkada Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Mateo, California, United States - Built interactive door device visualization for Floorplans UI using React, TypeScript, and Redux, enabling remote lock/unlock controls and device navigation – a critical and highly requested feature for sales demos - Designed reusable component architecture integrating Access Control into Floorplans, enabling rapid feature expansion and cross-product use case demonstrations for existing customers - Documented implementation plans and engineering tradeoff discussions in a comprehensive technical project specification, enhancing project clarity and boosting cross-team awareness ### Software Engineering Intern @ Learning A-Z Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Built and documented a full-stack dashboard feature to display four types of classroom performance statistics to teachers using Angular, Laravel, and MySQL - Participated in daily scrum meetings and provided regular status updates to Engineering team - Presented research project on cloud deployment and demoed hosting a Flask app using Google Cloud Datastore on Google Cloud App Engine - Wrote high-coverage unit tests and participated in code reviews to improve code quality and maintainability ### RenewCS Mentor @ University of Michigan - School of Information Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States - Led weekly help sessions for women and non-binary students in introductory CS courses to reinforce key concepts - Hosted special events to provide guidance and career advice and promote a sense of belonging ## Education ### Master of Science in Engineering in Computer Science University of Michigan College of Engineering ### Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science University of Michigan College of Engineering ### Reese High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/melina-odell - Portfolio: https://melodell.github.io --- Source: https://flows.cv/melinaodell JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/melinaodell/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11