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Open to SWE internships & roles

I build full-stack AI products and the production infrastructure behind them.

Computer Science @ University of Illinois Chicago (Software Engineering concentration). Currently a Software Engineering Intern at Mylon.AI and building MedBill Analyzer.

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Karol Pawlowski - Resume

Chicago, ILGitHubLinkedIn

Featured projects

Things I've built and run.

Strongest first - each is a real system I designed, built, and operate end to end.

MedBill Analyzer · Current

Medical Bill Analyzer

Benchmarks every charge against 9,000+ CMS fee-schedule rates - backed by 158 automated tests across a 3-job CI pipeline.

A free, anonymous full-stack web app that checks medical bill charges against CMS Medicare reference rates: OCR extracts CPT/HCPCS codes and dollar amounts, a fee-schedule lookup scores each line as a multiple of the Medicare rate (near, above, or far above reference - or unverified when a code isn't in the CMS tables, so it never asserts an overcharge it can't confirm), and Claude drafts a review letter for the flagged charges.

The React 19 + Vite frontend on Vercel calls serverless functions that proxy to a Python FastAPI backend on Modal behind a fail-closed shared-secret trust boundary. Uploads are validated by magic bytes with decompression-bomb and PDF page-cap guards and processed entirely in memory - nothing is stored, and per-IP rate limiting keys on an HMAC so raw IPs never are either. Every letter is re-verified server-side against the CMS tables, ignoring client-supplied rates, and untrusted text is fenced off from the model to block prompt injection.

GitHub Actions runs 158 tests across 3 parallel jobs on every push and PR - 82 pytest (94% backend coverage, including end-to-end OCR through real Tesseract), 60 Vitest, and 16 Playwright browser E2E tests with an axe-core WCAG 2.1 AA scan of every page at zero violations. The suite is mutation-checked: breaking a status band, the 413 handler, or a label's contrast fails CI. Vercel's Git integration ships a preview build for every PR and deploys each merge to main straight to production.

Bill upload
React 19 · Vercel
OCR
Tesseract · PyMuPDF
Code extraction
CPT / HCPCS · regex
Fee-schedule check
Neon Postgres · 9,000+ CMS rates
Review letter
Claude Haiku · server-verified
How a bill flows through MedBill Analyzer.

React · Vite · Python · FastAPI · Modal · PostgreSQL (Neon) · Tesseract OCR · Claude API · pytest · Vitest · Playwright · GitHub Actions

Updated Oct 2026

StockSignal

ML Stock Price Predictor

A 3-layer PyTorch LSTM serving live training progress and 7-day forecasts.

Trains an LSTM forecasting model and serves its predictions through a REST API to a real-time dashboard.

The 3-layer PyTorch LSTM sits behind a FastAPI REST API; a React + Tailwind dashboard streams real-time training progress alongside 7-day price forecasts.

Python · PyTorch · FastAPI · React · Tailwind CSS

Updated Apr 2026

Self-Hosted Homelab

Cloud Infrastructure · 2023–present

13+ services and 20+ users running on bare metal - 99.9%+ uptime, zero open ports.

A self-hosted platform on Proxmox VMs with TrueNAS (ZFS) storage and Dockerized apps, including a GPU-accelerated media server with hardware transcoding serving 20+ users across streaming and photo services.

Remote access is zero-trust - Cloudflare DNS, a hardened VPS reverse proxy, and a Tailscale mesh VPN - so there are zero open ports while holding 99.9%+ uptime over three years.

13+
Services
20+
Users
99.9%
Uptime
0
Open ports
3 yrs
In production

Proxmox · TrueNAS (ZFS) · Docker · Linux · Cloudflare · Tailscale

Updated Oct 2026

Midea AC

Home Assistant Integration · HACS

Controls Midea air conditioners entirely over the LAN - the cloud is touched once at setup, never at runtime.

A Home Assistant custom integration (distributed through HACS) that controls Midea and Midea-OEM air conditioners locally over the network. It exposes a full climate entity - power, HVAC mode, target temperature, fan speed, and swing - alongside switches, sensors, selects, a number, and a fan entity for the extra features a unit supports: eco / sleep / boost modes, indoor and outdoor temperature, humidity, energy and realtime power, airflow angle, and a fresh-air module.

Built on the midea-local protocol library, it uses the Midea cloud account only once during setup - to discover devices and fetch each unit's local encryption keys - after which control is fully local (local_push, no runtime cloud dependency). Entities are generated dynamically from each unit's own reported capabilities, so only the controls your specific AC actually has ever appear.

Python · Home Assistant · HACS · asyncio · midea-local

1Updated Jul 2026

TetherDisplay

Local USB Display Streaming · iPad + Windows

Turns an iPad into a USB-C second monitor for Windows - a low-latency H.265/HEVC pipeline that's fully local with zero cloud, backed by 93 passing unit tests.

TetherDisplay uses an iPad (10th gen) as a USB-C second monitor for a Windows laptop. Since iPads have no native display input, this is a compressed-video streaming pipeline that runs over the USB cable: Windows captures a virtual display via Windows.Graphics.Capture, encodes it with NVIDIA NVENC for low-latency HEVC, streams it over usbmux (the same protocol macOS uses for device syncing), then decodes and renders on the iPad using VideoToolbox and Metal.

The stack spans two systems: Windows host service in C++ (IddCx virtual display, WGC capture, NVENC encode, clean-room usbmux transport) and a Swift/Xcode iPad app (PeerTalk tunneling, VideoToolbox decode, Metal render). All protocol logic is portable, compiled, and tested in WSL (93 unit tests pass); Win32/WinRT/GPU code is written against citation-backed docs and verified on hardware. Security: TOFU pairing + libsodium AEAD encryption. No Wi-Fi, no LAN, no cloud - only the USB cable.

Virtual display
IddCx · Windows
Capture
Windows.Graphics.Capture (WGC)
Encode
NVIDIA NVENC · H.265 / HEVC
Transport
usbmux · libsodium AEAD
Decode & render
VideoToolbox · Metal · iPad
How video flows from Windows to iPad over USB-C.

C++ · Swift · Windows API (IddCx, WinRT, D3D11) · NVIDIA NVENC · VideoToolbox · Metal · libsodium · CMake · Protocol Buffers

Updated Jul 2026

KVDatabase

LSM-Tree Storage Engine · C++17

Serves ~2.9M reads/sec from a from-scratch LSM-tree - the storage-engine design behind RocksDB and LevelDB, with zero dependencies beyond the standard library.

A persistent key-value store built on a Log-Structured Merge tree in pure C++17. Writes hit an fsync'd write-ahead log and a sorted in-memory memtable, then flush to immutable on-disk SSTables; reads check the memtable, then each SSTable newest-to-oldest - a per-table bloom filter skips the ones that can't hold the key (no disk I/O at all, cutting negative-lookup cost ~42x), and a sparse index seeks the rest to within a 16-record scan.

Range scans do a k-way heap merge over the memtable and every SSTable, newest source winning per key with tombstones filtered out; compaction folds all tables into one and drops deleted keys. A rewritten-atomically manifest survives crashes mid-write, and a WAL replay on restart never loses an acknowledged write. CI builds with -Wall -Wextra -Werror and runs the assert-based suite twice - plain, then under AddressSanitizer + UBSan.

Write
WAL (fsync'd) · memtable
Flush
immutable SSTable + manifest
Read
bloom filter · sparse index
Scan
k-way heap merge
Compact
merge · drop tombstones
How a key moves through KVDatabase.

C++17 · LSM-tree · Bloom filters · Write-ahead log · Make · GitHub Actions

Updated Aug 2026

Experience

Where I've worked.

Mylon.AI · Now

Jun 2026 – Present · Remote

Software Engineering Intern

Owned 4 of the core data-pipeline features for a multi-tenant RAG platform that answers staff questions from institutional documents with cited sources, on a 3-engineer team that shipped 13 of 14 features to production against live Supabase. Built a 3-format document ingestion pipeline (PDF / DOCX / HTML via LlamaIndex, Voyage AI 1024-dim embeddings) and a 5-table pgvector schema with HNSW cosine search and Row-Level Security enforcing per-tenant isolation. Engineered the FastAPI RAG query API - vector retrieval through a security-scoped SQL function feeding Claude-generated answers with structured citations - backed by 55+ automated tests and hardened against cross-tenant leakage by fixing all 9 findings from an adversarial security review.

Player One Amusement Group

Jan 2023 – Jan 2026 · Chicago, IL

Technician Apprentice (under senior technician)

Diagnosed and fixed hardware and software failures across 20+ arcade systems at 8 locations, completing 100+ on-site repairs a year through systematic root-cause debugging. Configured, calibrated, and validated newly installed units.

About

Product, ML, and the infrastructure underneath.

Karol Pawlowski

I'm a CS student at UIC (Software Engineering concentration, graduating December 2027) who builds full-stack, AI-powered products and runs the self-hosted infrastructure they live on.

That trifecta is the point: I ship product, train and serve ML models, and operate the production infrastructure underneath - most visibly a homelab I've run for three years. I'm equally at home in a React frontend, a Python backend, and a Linux box wiring up networking.

I learn by building real systems end to end and keeping them running, then reaching for the next problem that forces me to learn something new.

Education

B.S. Computer Science - Software Engineering concentration

University of Illinois Chicago

GPA 3.34 / 4.0 · Expected December 2027

Relevant coursework

Data Structures · Object-Oriented Programming · x86-64 Assembly & Machine Organization · Theory of Computation

Certifications & achievements

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (2023)
  • 3rd Place - Capture the Flame 2026 CTF, Beginner Division (3-person UIC team; sponsors: Zebra Technologies, CompTIA, SANS Institute)

Skills

The toolkit.

What I actually build with - grouped, not ranked.

Languages
C++ · C · Python · JavaScript · TypeScript · Java · SQL · HTML/CSS
Frameworks
React · Vite · FastAPI · Node.js · Tailwind CSS · REST APIs · pytest · Vitest · Playwright
Cloud & DevOps
AWS · Vercel · Modal · Docker · Git · GitHub Actions · Linux
Data & ML
PostgreSQL · PyTorch · Pandas · NumPy · scikit-learn · Tesseract OCR · Claude API
Infrastructure & Networking
Proxmox · TrueNAS (ZFS) · Tailscale · Cloudflare · Nginx Proxy Manager · Pi-hole

Open to SWE internships & roles

Let's build something that stays up.

I'm looking for software engineering internships and roles. Email is the fastest way to reach me - I reply quickly.