Michelle Pokrass in

Michelle Pokrass

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Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI
📍 San Francisco, California, United States

Michelle Pokrass is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, focusing on its API and core platform. Her career includes roles as a Staff Software Engineer at Clubhouse and a Senior Software Engineer at Coinbase, showcasing her expertise in backend systems. She earned a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Michelle is an active voice in the developer community, frequently sharing her insights on technical podcasts like Latent Space and speaking at major events such as OpenAIs DevDay. She is passionate about discussing API design, function calling, and making advanced AI models accessible to developers.

Michelle was a featured speaker at OpenAIs inaugural DevDay, where she co-presented a developers guide to the OpenAI API.

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Experience
8 Years
Current Role
Member of Technical Staff
Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Personality Overview

How Michelle shows up

Communication Style
Decision Approach
Work Preference

Behavioral traits and communication patterns that shape how this person evaluates opportunities, builds trust, and makes decisions in professional settings.

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Priorities

Topics Michelle cares about

Developer APIs
As a key member of OpenAI's API team, she publicly speaks about API design, function calling, and structured outputs at conferences and on podcasts.
AI Partnerships
Publicly expressed excitement for OpenAI's partnership with Apple, indicating an interest in bringing AI capabilities to new platforms and a wider user base.
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Career

Work history

9-2022
Member of Technical Staff
OpenAI
3-2021 - 9-2022
Staff Software Engineer
Clubhouse
7-2018 - 9-2020
Senior Software Engineer
Coinbase
1-2017 - 4-2017
Software Engineering Intern
Stripe
5-2016 - 8-2016
Software Engineering Intern
Coinbase
In the press

Media appearances

Ep 64: GPT‑4.1 Lead at OpenAI Michelle Pokrass. Featured in Apple Podcasts
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Michelle Pokrass, Post‑Training Research Lead at OpenAI – Interview. Featured in YouTube
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Education
2013 - 2018
Bachelor of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Social presence
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Behavioral profile

DISC profile (public)

DISC behavioral profile

Dominance, influence, steadiness, and calculativeness scores with guidance on how this person prefers to communicate and decide.

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