# Michael Marek

> Software Engineer at Yelp

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

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Yelp
Jan 2018 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
Marketplace Data Observability team. We manage pipelines for processing large volumes of business-critical ads data and powering analytics.

Technical domain includes
* Distributed Systems
* Batch/Stream Processing
* Logging
* Data Schematization, Modeling, Observability, & Warehousing
* Job Orchestration 

Business domain includes
* Ad Metrics
* Ad Attribution
* Advertiser Billing
* Ad Delivery Monetization
* Bot Filtering

Mentorship: I've guided many engineers (NA + EU) during their onboarding, projects (design/scoping/prioritization), and oncall shifts. 

Incident response: We're one of the most oncall-heavy teams at Yelp, and I've been responsible for accurately assessing the (financial) impact of many incidents, quickly resolving them, writing postmortems, proposing platform/infra improvements, and making our systems more failure-resilient.

### Software Engineering Intern @ Yelp
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California, United States
Team: Ads Backend

Simplified campaign management for advertisers with multiple budgets (i.e. regular + promotional), allowing bids to be set more efficiently:
* Created a new MySQL table for representing ad campaign budget changes and a Cassandra table for representing an ad campaign's spend within a specific budget period
* Created APIs for querying/updating the above tables (i.e. performing budget edits, getting spend info, etc)

Languages: Python

### Software Engineering Intern @ Yelp
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California, United States
Team: Ads Backend

Developed a package for logging user interactions with Yelp ads (impressions and clicks) so that new ad products could be monetized quickly and safely:
* Implemented schema validation for heavily nested revenue-critical logs, thereby reducing the risk of malformed data entering Yelp’s ads systems
* Ran performance tests to ensure that the package had a tolerable impact on page load times
* Rolled the package out to 100% of ad traffic and added SignalFx metrics reporting to make it easier to detect logging issues in the future
* Used Spark to compare data produced by the package against data produced by the legacy system

Languages: Python

### Software Engineering Intern @ Zynga
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Toronto, Canada Area
Team: Game Services

Developed an API for searching usernames and retrieving player info within popular games:
* Implemented a new endpoint that allows you to retrieve information about a player by supplying either an exact or partial name
* Utilized an Elasticsearch-backed service for the partial-matching aspect of this endpoint, and created an SQS workflow for indexing player data in Elasticsearch
* Performed various performance tests using JMeter and optimized reads/writes

Made performance improvements to a graph-based service that managed player relationships:
* Modularized SQS consumers and redeployed them with separate autoscaling

Languages: Go, Java

### Software Engineering Intern @ Vidyard
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Kitchener, Canada Area
Team: Video Player & Dashboard

Made several improvements to Vidyard's video player, focusing on user experience and metrics reporting:
* Simplified code for video playback, reducing load times on desktop and mobile
* Identified and fixed issues where video engagement data wasn't being properly reported during video playback
* Refactored code that controlled the player's responsiveness under different screen resolutions, improving the user experience on mobile
* Improved the player's accessibility, localization, and cross-device/browser compatibility
* Redesigned existing player components and expanded customization options

Languages: JavaScript, CSS/HTML, and Ruby on Rails

### Software Engineering Intern @ Sandvine
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Waterloo
Team: Subscriber Policy Broker

Designed and developed the first REST API for the Subscriber Policy Broker and prepared its integration with Sandvine's new microservice architecture:
* Implemented over 30 endpoints and various framework components. Wrote tests using JUnit.
* Collaborated with other platform teams to standardize on service discovery, authentication, documentation, metric collection, and error handling

Languages: Java


## Education
### Bachelor of Software Engineering (BSE) in Honours Software Engineering
University of Waterloo

### Ontario Secondary School Diploma
Forest Heights Collegiate Institute


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michaelmarek96

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