Nicholas
McCracken.
Software Engineer • AI/ML • Data Engineering
I'm a software engineer and M.S. CSE student at Ohio State with experience across backend systems, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, and AI/ML.
Experience.
Nationwide
AI/ML Engineering Intern
Columbus, OH
- Built a distributed claims risk pipeline on AWS with PySpark, engineering features from claim severity, geography, and historical data to improve model accuracy 75% over baseline.
- Developed an AI agent that generated production-ready ML repositories with batch and real-time inference workflows, REST APIs, and automated validation suites, reducing model onboarding time by 25%.
- Expanded regression test coverage by 35% across 5 production models using AWS, Jenkins, and PyTest.
Procter & Gamble
Data Engineering Intern
Cincinnati, OH
- Built and deployed a full-stack sales forecasting platform with Plotly Dash, PostgreSQL, Docker, and Kubernetes to support promotion analytics and lift estimation.
- Developed a baseline sales prediction algorithm, revealing $3M+ in profit optimization across key product lines.
- Designed validation workflows in Databricks and SQL Server, reducing downstream anomalies by 33%.
Procter & Gamble
Software Engineering Intern
Cincinnati, OH
- Built a PyQt and Selenium form-automation tool that eliminated 750 hours of manual work annually.
- Developed a reusable Java and Selenium testing framework that increased automated test coverage by 125%.
- Built PySpark ETL pipelines in Databricks on AWS, cutting data delivery time by 80%.
The Ohio State University
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Columbus, OH
- Support an upper-level graphics course covering Unity, C#, real-time rendering, and agent-based simulation.
- Mentor 100+ students through office hours and review sessions while grading assignments, labs, and exams.
Projects.
RepoRover — Chat with a Codebase
A repository exploration and security-assessment tool that pairs conversational code questions with a navigable file tree and code viewer. The backend ingests GitHub repositories, chunks and embeds source code, and indexes it in Elasticsearch for retrieval-augmented responses.
Dissonance — Music Discovery & Reviews
An Android app for exploring the Discogs catalog and sharing album reviews. It combines Firebase-backed accounts and reviews with paginated discovery, ViewModel-based UI state, image loading, and resilient connectivity handling.
LLM Fine-Tuning & Data Filtering
An experimental pipeline for testing how instruction-data filtering affects supervised fine-tuning. I compared length, lexical-diversity, deduplication, and combined filters on Llama 3.2 1B, with configurable training, LoRA adapter merging, and benchmark evaluation.
Mathematical Symbol Recognition
A PyTorch image classifier that recognizes 16 handwritten mathematical symbols using a three-layer convolutional network. The project includes image preprocessing, training on 7,557 images, early stopping, and evaluation on a separate 1,010-image dataset.
TravelTabs — Shared Trip Expenses
A collaborative Rails app for managing group trips, recording shared expenses, allocating costs, and reviewing balances. My contributions focused on relational data modeling, authentication flows, email-based user lookup, validation, and trip and expense controller logic.
Airport Task Robot
A physical task robot built around closed-loop motion and environmental sensing. It uses PID control, wheel encoders, position correction, sensors, and servo-driven mechanisms to navigate and complete tasks reliably.
Education.
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OHM.S. Computer Science and Engineering
August 2025 – December 2026
GPA: 3.9 / 4.0
B.S. Computer Science and Engineering
August 2022 – December 2025
GPA: 3.9 / 4.0
Technical Toolkit.
Languages
The foundations
AI, ML & Data
Intelligence & insight
Web, Mobile & Graphics
Interfaces & experiences
Databases & Services
Knowledge & connections
Cloud, DevOps & Testing
Systems that endure
Contact.
I'm always happy to connect with engineers, founders, recruiters, or anyone solving interesting software problems.
Get in touch