Dakota
McDaniels
Backend Software Engineer and AI Innovator with a track record of building scalable, high-performance systems. Extensive experience in cloud infrastructure, database architecture, and ML/NLP model deployment. Proven ability to leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to drive business growth and user engagement.
Experience
Co-Founder and Co-CTO
Pluto.fi (May 2021 - August 2023)
- Spearheaded the development of an AI-driven financial advisory platform, successfully raising $5M in VC funding and scaling our technology to support 25,000 users and manage over $40M in assets.
- I architected a robust infrastructure comprising over 50 Kubernetes microservices, ensuring 99.99% system uptime and processing over 100 million transactions monthly with sub-10ms latency.
Cybersecurity Engineer
Lowe's (May 2020 - May 2021)
- Led security compliance monitoring across a 70-team organization responsible for $8B in online sales through routine reporting and notifications.
Network Security Engineer
University of South Carolina (October 2018 - December 2020)
- Supervised and mentored nine Computer Science interns. Single-handedly responsible for 42.5% of the internship program’s total output.
Undergraduate Research in Cybersecurity
Office of Naval Research (August 2020 - October 2020)
- Researched DDoS attack mitigation using Palo Alto’s next-generation firewalls as a part of the $500k grant for ”Cyberinfrastructure Expertise on High-throughput Networks for Big Science Data Transfers” (NSF 1829698).
Projects
Quantitative Securities Trading System
Built a performant, event-sourced data pipeline for backtesting with over 700M minutes of historical tick data in Python. Deployed a secure AWS infrastructure using ECS and Docker to manage over $50,000 of personal investment capital.
BetterReplies
An iOS app featuring a fine-tuned AI assistant capable of generating personalized replies. Developed with Python and SwiftUI, automatically deployed using GitHub Actions and Terraform to a cloud-native infrastructure on AWS services.