Michelle Byrnes

• Built a privacy-preserving telemetry platform for AI developer-tool usage, spanning TypeScript/PHP log normalization, authenticated ingestion, reconciliation, and token/cache analytics. Upstreamed a reusable authenticated post-call hook to a public MCP proxy and redesigned reconciliation as an isolated paginated job to bound memory and retained state.
• Built a PHP and React self-service platform that encoded governance and architectural defaults into repeatable performance tests, reducing execution time by 98%.
• Built a Node.js and TypeScript observability service that combines New Relic and k6 data with sandboxed coding agents to investigate concurrency bottlenecks, generate candidate patches, and preserve decisions in ADRs, reducing optimization cycles by 40%.
• Led performance initiatives that reduced origin latency by 12%–24%, using New Relic profiling and distributed k6 tests in Grafana Cloud to validate behavior under load.
• Led reliability engineering for a global live event that generated more than one billion requests. Designed a stale-while-revalidate object-cache strategy with TTL jitter, maintaining 100% availability and a 99.6% cache-hit rate during peak traffic.
• Led rapid prototypes with external engineering teams, translating platform constraints into working proofs of concept that progressed into production integrations.

• Led a cross-functional effort to turn internal command-line utilities into a user-facing self-service product, eliminating 37% of annual manual intervention requests.
• Built guarded automation for routine database operations, reducing delivery time by 70% while keeping destructive actions constrained and reviewable.
• Interviewed engineers and operational stakeholders, translated recurring friction into product requirements, and used those findings to shape the tooling roadmap.

• Led complex escalations across Kubernetes, PHP, SQL, and Elasticsearch. Combined production debugging with durable monitoring and tooling improvements so similar failures became easier to detect and diagnose.

• Advised metadata changes that improved search accuracy by 250%.
• Designed client side solutions given server side restrictions.
• Researched, reviewed, and customized platform tools and features to be leveraged and maintained by non technical users.

• Engineered an interface that eliminates 75% of redundant labor.
• Revised a theme to optimize the UI by decreasing excessive clicks by 66%.
• Led technical training workshops and published theme documentation.

• Built search and discovery interfaces that increased relevant content delivery by 350%, helping researchers and the public navigate a large collection of historical materials.
• Designed a data-import process that reduced ingestion time by 99% and standardized metadata to reduce long-term maintenance.
• Led a platform migration, developed contributor-facing publishing tools, and wrote a WordPress curriculum that enabled nontechnical collaborators to create and maintain digital exhibits.

An independent research platform for studying adaptive computation in language models.

• Built a roughly 30.6-million-parameter gated Transformer in PyTorch with external PPO-controlled modulation and input-dependent per-token gates.
• Built the surrounding research platform with Fastify, React, Redis, SSE streams, background orchestration, local and remote GPU execution, checkpoint management, generation comparison, and exportable reports.
• Ran three controlled RL-gating experiments that consistently underperformed neutral gating. Traced the failure to the constrained action space, documented the negative result, and changed the research direction.
• Implemented input-dependent gates with 0.01% parameter overhead and pre-registered quality, sparsity, and adaptivity criteria. Added an MCP interface with a lazy disk cache for AI-assisted experiment analysis.

A released Pokémon Emerald modification built in C for the Game Boy Advance.

• Starts players at the Battle Frontier, adds an in-game team editor with legal Generation III move validation, and introduces independently tracked Hard modes across all seven facilities.
• Includes 12 deterministic C gameplay suites and 19 input-driven mGBA scenarios with fixed RNG seeds, isolated save state, path-based CI selection, and memory-headroom gates.
• Uses a reproducible release pipeline that verifies the production build, generates checksummed BPS patches, and excludes copyrighted ROMs and test binaries from published artifacts.