Merced, California

Jacob Lawson

Status Open to Summer 2027 New Grad Sofware Engineering Jobs.

I'm a Computer Science & Engineering student at UC Merced. I build full-stack tools that make messy data useful — scrapers, simulators, dashboards — and I run a small homelab because breaking my own network is a good way to learn how networks work.

Read my résumé GitHub LinkedIn

Experience

  1. 2025

    R&D Software Engineering Intern

    Robotics Cats

    Built Python tooling for environmental monitoring: a mapping application for visualizing wildfire risk, and an audio detection pipeline that flags the sound of illegal logging.

  2. 2023now

    Student Technology Consultant

    UC Merced — Office of Information Technology

    Resolve hardware, network, and account problems for faculty, staff, and students, and keep classroom AV and roughly 200 campus printers running.

  3. 2022

    Undergraduate Research Assistant

    UC Merced — LInC Lab

    Automated the cleaning of 600+ CSV transcription files with Python and pandas, and organized study data so researchers could actually find what they needed.

B.S. Computer Science & Engineering

University of California, Merced · Expected May 2027

Algorithms · Computer Architecture · Data Structures · Database Systems · Full-Stack Web Development · Discrete Mathematics · Probability & Statistics

Active member of the National Society of Black Engineers.

Projects

OWCS-Sim

Simulates full Overwatch Champions Series seasons using real rosters and match results parsed from OWTV.gg. Pick a bracket, run the season, see who survives.(WIP)

  • React
  • Vite
  • Express
  • Node.js

Bobcat Bulletin

Turns the UC Merced PD daily crime log into a searchable, filterable feed, so students can see what's happening on campus without digging through PDFs.

  • Node.js
  • Express
  • SQLite
  • React

LiftLabs

A full-stack discussion forum with JWT authentication and role-based moderation — the kind of permissions plumbing that's easy to describe and hard to get right.

  • React
  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • JWT

Greenview

Browser extension that highlights the software a job application is looking for, so you can avoid workday blues.

  • JavaScript
  • Browser Extension

Everything else lives on GitHub →

Toolkit

Languages
Python · C++ · JavaScript · SQL · HTML/CSS
Frameworks
React · Vite · Node.js · Express · Flask · pandas · NumPy
Tools
Git · Linux · SQLite · PostgreSQL · AWS · VS Code

Homelab

A Raspberry Pi called lawsonpi runs Pi-hole for network-wide DNS filtering, Homebridge to drag stubborn devices into HomeKit, and Tailscale so I can reach all of it from anywhere. Most of what I know about DNS, I learned by breaking it. Soon to be bigger and better than ever.

Off the clock: weightlifting, competitive Overwatch, nonfiction, and answering to two cats.

Contact

If you're hiring interns, building something interesting, or just want to argue about self-hosting — my inbox is open.