Michal Dvořák

Principal Software Engineer at Oracle (OCI) | Release & Test Infrastructure | Python, FastAPI, Cloud | ex-Novanta Lead

Czechia

About

I own internal release and test service at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, currently a release platform distributing drivers and firmware for hardware, including next-generation GPU and AI server platforms. My path is unusual: PhD in biometrics, years of optics, embedded and camera system design, then machine vision products, and now cloud release engineering. I'm most useful where hardware meets software: places where someone needs to understand the sensor, the firmware, the pipeline and the service on top of it. What I keep coming back to: taking ownership of a critical system, bringing new engineers up to independence on it, and moving to the next problem. Lately that includes building agentic LLM workflows for large-scale legacy test migration.

Experience

  • Principal Software Engineer at Oracle
    Aug 2025 - Present · 1 yr

    𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 (current focus)   • Own development and support of a FastAPI web service distributing drivers, firmware and platform tools for OCI hardware, deployed via Docker with an Nginx reverse proxy; contribute across backend (Python), HTML templates and JavaScript front-end components.   • Designed and built the firmware ingestion pipeline for next-generation GPU and AI server platforms: integrity verification, antivirus scanning, storage to OCI Object Storage and Artifactory, and OCI Notifications triggering downstream build systems.   • Migrated the firmware packaging workflow from a legacy service and extended it into the platform's main firmware upload path.   • Introduced unit testing to a previously untested codebase 𝗛𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 (first year, ownership handed off)   • Gradually assumed ownership for regression testing and release validation for OCI's host management platform, covering network and AI accelerator cards (update, provisioning and status workflows).   • Designed an agentic LLM migration framework (workflow definitions, rule files, format and validation conventions, differential test harnesses running legacy and migrated tests against each other) to automate migration of a Python 2.7 test suite to modern Python and pytest. Ongoing initiative.

  • Lead Software Engineer at Novanta Inc.
    May 2022 - Jul 2025 · 3 yrs 3 mos

    • Led mentoring and technical direction alongside core development: mentored junior developers, supervised a bachelor's thesis, delivered a university guest lecture on RFID and ran internal workshops on biometrics and Python.   • Core developer of a Python/PySide machine-vision application for visual programming, image calibration and shared library integration.   • Designed a WebSocket interface enabling RFID integration with third-party APIs; contributed to architecture of a cloud-based RFID middleware platform, including technology evaluations for identity management and health monitoring services.   • Owned Jenkins CI/CD covering multi-platform builds, licensing, packaging and distribution; initiated build pipeline hardening and software protection integration.

  • PHD Student at Brno University of Technology Faculty of Information Technology
    Jul 2015 - Mar 2023 · 7 yrs 9 mos

    Succesfully defended my thesis titled: New technologies for biometric recognition based on hand characteristics Focusing on on-the-fly biometric recognition. https://www.fit.vut.cz/study/phd-thesis/965/.cs?type=PD

  • Software Developer at Cathx Ocean
    Mar 2021 - Apr 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos

    Development of software products and tools which interact with and process data from embedded applications. Development of UI's for 2D and 3D Visualisation including machine vision/machine learning processes. Development of machine vision algorithms for measurement and visualisation. GUI Maintenance and Development: Maintenance of existing control and configuration GUIs including enhancements and bug fixing.

  • Software and Hardware developer of 3D Hand at Touchless Biometric Systems s.r.o.
    Apr 2019 - Mar 2020 · 1 yr

    Design and implementation of a triggered camera system solution for biometric application - Optical design of the camera system - Electronics (Triggering, illuminantion control, control board) - SW programming (Triggering, illuminantion control, camera control) Rapid prototyping