Software Engineer • Las Vegas, NV
Michael
Podolsky
Software, built with care, end to end. Consumer apps, internal platforms, and the AI systems underneath them.
West Co.
Aug 2022 — Present
Software Engineer
Tangle
An online space for living with intention, built alongside founders Evan Sharp and Biz Stone. I architected significant portions of the stack and data model, and built the core product flows end to end.
2,000+
Weekly active users
20,000+
Weekly core actions
iOS & Android
Shipped to both stores
Lifeguide
An LLM coaching agent written in Go on the Anthropic API — multi-turn tool calling, persisted conversations, background fact extraction with supersession, image generation, and a Svelte chat interface.
Interview engine
A pluggable interview system with per-kind handlers, type-safe argument validation, and persisted incremental state — six distinct experiences on one substrate, with funnel analytics and push-to-talk speech recognition.
Native mobile
Launched and owned both apps on Capacitor, including custom native camera and media plugins, universal deep links, and the App Store and Play Store releases.
Foundations
Authentication, onboarding, the social graph, user tracking, and product analytics.
Earlier prototypes
happiness.science
A Next.js and Express application for delivering spiritual practices, with user accounts, personalized content access, and administrative publishing views.
Practice Generator
A Flask app using early GPT-3.5-family models to help writers draft practices, with authoring tools, review workflows, and an approval pipeline into production.
TypeScript, Go, Svelte, SvelteKit, Next.js, Express, Flask, Capacitor, PostgreSQL, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, GCP
Vantage Discovery
Jul 2023 — Feb 2024
Software Engineer
Acquired by Shopify
ATC
An internal engineering platform for managing and monitoring Vantage's architecture. I designed and built it alone, end to end.
Observability
Unified health, load, and instance monitoring with drill-down diagnostics across services.
Customer management
Administrative tooling for customer accounts and configuration.
Data ingestion
File conversion tooling across customer formats, transforming into Vantage's schema for embedding ingestion.
Python, Java, TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, Node.js, OpenAI API
Background
UNLV
BS Computer Science
Expected Dec 2026
I taught myself to code during the 2020 shutdown, with the same discipline I'd been putting into guitar since I was nine. It wasn't long before I was doing it for a living.
I've been at West Co. from the earliest days, through a long run of prototypes and into Tangle. It's an online space for living with intention, built alongside founders Evan Sharp and Biz Stone, and more than two thousand people show up every week. I've taken nearly every core screen in the product from the interface all the way down to the database.
The best work I've done came from a small team that was driven and kind at the same time. People who took the work seriously and put something soulful into it. That's what I want next.
- Languages
- TypeScript, Go, SQL, Swift, Python
- Frameworks
- React, Next.js, Svelte, SvelteKit, Express, Flask
- Technologies
- PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Node.js, Capacitor, Tailwind, Git, Figma, Claude Code, Codex