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nate

nate

(he/him)

senior software engineer: maintaining oss and applying ai

Senior Software Engineer at Prefect

Open to:Full-time rolesMentoring othersBoard positionsBeing mentoredCollaborationsContract roles
Preferred workplace:Remote (worldwide)Hybrid

Hi, I’m Nate! Shameless nerd, incessant question-asker & chemical engineering / physics graduate from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, I currently work as a software engineer at Prefect on open-source data and ai tooling.

I maintain several popular open-source libraries like prefect, fastmcp and marvin, while contributing upstream when possible or necessary to projects like pydantic. I love ATProtocol, which I got started with by contributing to their python SDK, and now operate several pieces community infrastructure.

At prefect, I build and maintain interfaces between our orchestration/events APIs and the larger data ecosystem: integration libraries, pydantic, docker/k8s, agentic while loops, data stores. I slot AI into existing data tooling to remove toil from the densely toil-rich field we call Data Engineering (and now AI engineering, if we’re feeling it!).

Having started in data engineering consulting (internal libraries and web apps ranging in levels of sanity), I focus on designing and maintaining libraries and tools that are easy to trust and build upon. Feedback from real people is important to me—I parse themes from varied communities of thousands of engineers/customers to share what I’ve learned and build for all.

If I could resurrect a dead person, it would be Richard Feynman (if you were wondering).

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Career: 8

Senior Software Engineer

Prefect

Chicago, Illinois, US

Aug 2024 - Present

- expanding and maintaining the open-source Prefect SDK and server components - building AI-powered systems (NLIs + RAG etc) to extend teams within the organization - working with leadership and marketing to improve our digital footprint and outreach - working on next-gen tooling (fastmcp, pydantic-ai, rust-powered python)

Software Engineer

Prefect

Chicago, Illinois, US

Sep 2022 - Aug 2024

- implementing distributed task queues in the OSS and cloud product - designing interfaces between Prefect core and common tools it can orchestrate and observe - using LLMs, embeddings, and redis to build open-source tooling used internally to extend the team - maintaining DevOps / GitOps tooling in support of these interfaces - contributing features to Prefect in response to ecosystem trends - Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation to monitor and maintain the performance and reliability of Prefect Cloud.

Solutions Engineer

Prefect

Chicago, Illinois, US

Oct 2021 - Sep 2022

As a member of the professional services team, I acted as a consulting data engineer. This involved: - breaking down business logic into problems that are solvable with cloud-native tooling - python workflow development and data warehouse maintenance in support of data analysts and ML practitioners - provisioning runtime infrastructure for those workflows with Terraform on their cloud providers - contributing to open-source projects used in client projects (including Prefect and Airbyte)

Data Engineer

SLATE (acquired by Prefect)

Boulder, Colorado, US

Jan 2021 - Oct 2021

- Writing Prefect-orchestrated EL(T) pipelines running on GKS/EKS to support clients' data integration practice - Provisioning client infrastructure on AWS, GCP, Azure to enable HA, distributed workflows - Exploring, contributing to, and leveraging new data-integration tools like Airbyte to keep in touch with modern patterns - Identifying time & money sinks, reproducing important outcomes with open-source alternatives to inflexible, closed-source and costly tools

Physics Educator

Numerade

Boulder County, Colorado, US

Aug 2020 - Jan 2021

Research Assistant

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan, US

Jan 2019 - Aug 2019

-Wrote Monte Carlo models of percolating systems using union-find and path compression methods to observe emergence of long-range connectivity in various networks -Automated simulation-analysis workflow using Python, pandas, and shell scripts (from 20 mins of organizing output data to < 5 seconds per batch of output data) -Drafted and summarized simulation results in LaTeX as potential publication material for my supervisor.

Quality Engineer

Air Products

Jun 2018 - Aug 2018

- Trained plant equipment models from aggregated cloud datasets using non-linear regression methods - Created and trained equipment models for 50+ new HYCO plants in Asia - Investigated deviating models to determine the process inputs causing error - Recommended action to plant managers for breaches of process specifications (e.g. recommend cleaning compressors if vibration readings persistently high) - Took part in re-platforming of in-house equipment modeling software

Materials / General Engineer

L.E. Jones Company

Menominee, MI

May 2017 - Aug 2017

- Initiated transition from contracted to in-house website management by creating fully functional company website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Google API - Created production valve-seat models for project engineers with SOLIDWORKS - Worked closely with gauging department – created dimensioned part diagrams for operator reference and gathered operator input to improve workflow

Education: 1

University of Michigan

Bachelor of Science - BS, Chemical Engineering and Physics

Jan 2016 - Jan 2020

Projects: 5

plyr.fm

plyr.fm

Nov 2025 - Present

marvin

the OG structured outputs library

fastmcp

github.com/PrefectHQ/fastmcp/

zlay

tangled.org/zzstoatzz.io/zlay

atproto actor typeahead

typeahead.waow.tech

Credentials: 2

Publications: 25

half baked2 articles

open source your shit!

half-baked.pckt.blog

May 2026

first pckt post!

half-baked.pckt.blog

Jan 2026
n819 articles

how to be anti-social

nate.leaflet.pub

Apr 2026

within my ken

nate.leaflet.pub

Apr 2026

notes

nate.leaflet.pub

Apr 2026

atproto dev chat V recap

nate.leaflet.pub

Mar 2026
Mar 2026
Feb 2026
Feb 2026
Feb 2026
Feb 2026

unfettered

nate.leaflet.pub

Feb 2026
Feb 2026
Dec 2025

quicksliced my status

nate.leaflet.pub

Dec 2025

making a docs MCP server

nate.leaflet.pub

Nov 2025

a Prefect MCP server

nate.leaflet.pub

Oct 2025

friday night tangled-mcp

nate.leaflet.pub

Oct 2025
Sep 2025

hello world

nate.leaflet.pub

Aug 2025
Publication2 articles

Continue reading on Unthread

Apr 2026

Continue reading on Unthread

Mar 2026
nate1 article

waow, tech!

nate.offprint.app

Jan 2026
Publication1 article

some recent yak shaving!

Jan 2026

Skills: 36

Technical

Amazon Web Services (AWS)Asynchronous workAT ProtocolAutomationData AnalysisdockerDocumentationFastAPI
Front-end DevelopmentGitGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)JinjaJupyterKubernetesLaTeXLinuxmypyPandas (Software)pydanticPythonPython (Programming Language)redis streamsSoftware DesignSoftware DevelopmentTerraformWeb Scraping

Business

Consulting

Creative

Technical Writing

Interpersonal

Leadership

Other

AgentsCode GenerationInformation ExtractionKnowledge Graph EmbeddingsLarge Language Models (LLM)LLM dev toolsnatural language interfaces