# Sabrina McAvoy > Software Engineer Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/sabrinamcavoy I am a software engineer with 7+ years of programming experience in python and 3+ years of industry experience. I derive satisfaction in writing clean code that is easy to follow, safe, and performant. From data ETL, visualizations, algorithms, and analysis, I enjoy every aspect of working with data, as well as functional programming. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Basalt Health Jan 2025 – Present | New York, New York, United States Building and testing LLM based agents to facilitate medical information retrieval. ### Lead Programmer @ Digi Cafe Jan 2022 – Present * Developed a SvelteKit website for educating beginners in programming, building the entire backend with C++ and Poco libraries to manage WebSocket connections for user management and enable code execution in Python, R, and Rust directly on the site. * Engineered microservices in Go, including a REST API for Stripe payment processing, a Discord bot leveraging the Discord API for subscription authentication, and an interactive coding platform with dynamic project generation akin to LeetCode. * Deployed backend microservices on DigitalOcean's cloud platform, configured Nginx as a reverse proxy for directing web traffic, and orchestrated containerized services with Docker Compose for scalable, efficient management. ### Software Engineer @ Senzai AI Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Remote * Automated fine-tuning of OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo model to classify large-scale unstructured Ad data, built a pipeline to convert any input to JSONL, and utilized RestAPI with multi-threading for fine-tuning requests, achieving a 92% accuracy rate. * Deployed the product on an AWS EC2 container as a SaaS, using Docker Compose for multi-container orchestration and Apache Airflow to enable one-click execution from the front-end web page. * Designed a product interface webpage adaptable to both desktop and mobile platforms using React and MaterialUI, incorporating Redux for state management and Hasura GraphQL to interface with the PostgreSQL database for data storage and retrieval. * Wrote a high-performance recommendation engine using XGBoost, optimizing for AUC and conversion rate; Implemented rigorous feature engineering, preprocessing, and ensembling to enhance model accuracy across large datasets. ### Data Engineer @ BEKHealth Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Rhode Island, United States * Led a significant ETL refactor, achieving a 65% improvement in processing time by utilizing REST APIs to extract clinic data from multiple hospitals, transforming and normalizing datasets with Python (NumPy, Pandas), and loading them into a centralized MongoDB database. * Engaged in daily Scrum stand-ups and sprint planning sessions, applying Agile principles and practices such as Test-Driven Development and continuous integration to deliver error-free code on the first try, reducing QA cycle time by 30% and improving overall sprint velocity. ### Research Assistant @ Brown University Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Providence, Rhode Island, United States * Developed a Language-Agnostic Search Retrieval algorithm using tokenization, word embeddings, and custom-trained transformers to capture cross-language semantics, along with zero-shot learning and human-in-the-loop to ensure accurate document retrieval. * Adapted the system to run on SLURM compute infrastructure using nvidia-smi and parallelization, leveraging HPC for scalability, scripting for automation, performance tuning for GPU optimization, and implementing distributed computing to handle large-scale processing. ### Patches - computational photography final project @ Brown University Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 In a computational photography course I worked on a blur and deblur program that applied a blur in randomized locations (patches) in an image. Followed with steps to: identify blurred patches, deblur using a neural network, and determine an optimal number of samples to deblur an entire image. ### Brown Datathon - NLP @ Brown University Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Providence, Rhode Island, United States Participated in a datathon held at Brown university during the spring of 2020. A phrase insertion dataset collected from Wikipedia was provided. I developed a visualization of phrases to better understand the sorts of phrases inserted. This task utilized tf-idf vectorization to convert phrases to an index embedding, PCA to reduce embedding size, k-means to cluster groups, and finalized with t-sne to collapse groups to two dimensions for visualization. ### Data Science Intern @ Prospect Bio Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked at a small Biotech company in San Francisco, California that focused on making biosensors. Provided statistical methods to better understand their data, programs in Python to automate data processing, and database solutions to store their data. ### Laboratory Assistant @ Brown University Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Providence, Rhode Island Area I worked in a Developmental Biology lab with the Sea Urchin as our primary organisms. The research project I was working on focused on affecting a point mutation in a genome using a fusion CRISPR-Cas9-DA. Along the way, I learned a number of laboratory techniques (IVT, culturing, microscopy, injections) as well as effectively giving a presentation in front of co-workers and how to collaborate effectively. ### Tutor @ Self-employed Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 I've taught a number of students between third grade and second year of college about Math and Science. All ages are enjoyable to work with, and take gratification in seeing a student learn something new. ### Laboratory Research Assistant @ Morsani School of Medicine, USF Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Morsani School of Medicine Working in Dr. Wang's lab to culture and purify genes in the NFkB family (p50, p53, RelB, c-Rel). Have learned how to perform gel electrophoresis, bacterial culturing, DNA isolation through column filtration, solution preparation, centrifugation, slide prep, and using a spectrophotometer. Additional techniques I am in the process of learning are DNA recombination through SPLICE, electroporesis, and CoIP. ### Gymnastics Instructor @ Regal Gymnastics Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 ### Independent Research Project @ Center for Clinical and Translational Science, UVM Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | University of Vermont Thesis title: Comparative Analysis of COG-related Bacterial Genomes Developed an automated pipeline to analyze the functional composition of bacterial genomes using the programming language Ruby. ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science Brown University Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 ### Master of Science - MS in Data Science New College of Florida Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 ### Master of Arts (M.A.) in Biotechnology Brown University Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 ### Non-degree University of South Florida Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 ### B.S. in Molecular Genetics University of Vermont Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/slmcavoy --- Source: https://flows.cv/sabrinamcavoy JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sabrinamcavoy/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23