Developer · Infrastructure Engineer · Researcher · Animal Welfare

Hi, I'm Nick Furlo.

I build, maintain, and study the ways people use computer systems and infrastructure. Systems engineer by day, published HCI researcher by training, winner of a CSCW Best Paper award, and animal welfare specialist.

Get in touch Publications LinkedIn ResearchGate ACM Digital Library
Nick rescuing a kitten from a tree

About

I recently earned my Master of Science in Computer Science from Oakland University. Across my graduate and undergraduate years I worked in the Human-Computer Interaction lab and led a research team of four. My thesis focused on designing online dating with a focus on user safety and AI-mediated communication.

I have spent over thirteen years in network engineering and system administration and 10 years of software engineering. I also have seven years of sales and customer service experience.

Today I'm a Systems Engineer at Rocket, and the Trap-Neuter-Return Program Director at Detroit Alley Cats, a volunteer-run animal welfare nonprofit. If you'd like to work together on infrastructure, software, user research, or animal welfare, send me an email.

Skills

Infrastructure & Systems

  • Windows Server
  • Active Directory
  • Group Policy
  • DNS / DHCP
  • RADIUS & VPN
  • Firewalls & switching
  • Wi-Fi (Ubiquiti)
  • Technical documentation

Software Development

  • Python
  • Flask
  • Selenium
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • Android
  • AWS EC2
  • Node-RED

Research & Design

  • Qualitative research
  • Participatory design
  • Grounded theory
  • Surveys (Qualtrics)
  • Figma & Adobe XD
  • Usability testing
  • Requirements engineering
  • UML & data modeling

Practice

  • Agile Scrum
  • Volunteer program management
  • Animal welfare (TNR)
  • Technical & academic writing
  • Team leadership
  • Staff training
  • Jira
  • Live-stream production

Experience

  1. Mar 2026 – Present

    Trap-Neuter-Return Program Director

    Detroit Alley Cats · Volunteer leadership role

    • Lead a volunteer team of about 25 and manage all logistics of the Trap-Neuter-Return program.
    • Meet with colony caretakers, schedule clinic appointments, and coordinate trapping.
    • Oversee care for cats before and after surgery, and their release after recovery.
    • Keep complete records on every colony and cat.
    • Designed, implemented, and maintain a dedicated web app for tracking program data.
    • Facilitated the trapping of over 200 stray cats in Detroit for Trap-Neuter-Return.
    • Conducted fundraising events including comedy shows, online video game streaming, in-person canvassing at events, and running merchandise and information booths at street fairs.

  2. Jan 2024 – Present

    Systems Engineer

    Rocket

    • Manage Windows Remote Desktop Services environments used by over 2,000 team members across seven companies.
    • Deploy software with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and automate administration with PowerShell and PowerShell Universal.
    • Build monitoring, alerting, and host-health dashboards with Dynatrace and PagerDuty.
    • Created a PowerShell module for internal use to automate and simplify administration of complex Windows RDS infrastructure.
    • Final escalation point for Windows device issues, performing root cause analysis.

  3. Nov 2021 – Dec 2023

    Senior Support Engineer

    Red Level Group

    • Level 3 help desk engineer and final escalation point for over 250 clients around the globe.
    • Managed firewalls, switches, wireless, VMware, Windows servers (Active Directory, Group Policy, RADIUS, DNS, DHCP, IIS, VPN), Microsoft 365 and Azure, and Avaya phones for 100+ users.
    • Automated tasks with PowerShell, documented processes in IT Glue, and trained new help desk hires.
    • Completed a domain migration of all user hardware for two merging clients with remote users, and made on-site visits for network and workstation maintenance.

  4. May 2019 – May 2023

    Human-Computer Interaction Researcher

    Oakland University, School of Engineering and Computer Science

    • Authored and published peer-reviewed papers at CSCW, CHI, PACM HCI and more, with over 200 citations and over 14,000 downloads on the ACM Digital Library.
    • Awarded the CSCW 2021 Best Paper Award and the CSCW 2021 Impact Recognition Award.
    • Led a research team of three to five people using Agile Scrum.
    • Ran interviews, focus groups, and participatory design sessions with vulnerable populations, and analyzed them with grounded theory.

  5. Sep 2020 – Present

    Volunteer Senior Broadcast Engineer

    Powerhouse, Horror-ible Games & Licenseathon Charity Marathons

    • Lead teams of 5–12 people running live streams of up to 72 hours.
    • Trained staff on OBS, Node-RED dashboards, and moderation tooling, and redesigned the moderation dashboard's user flows.
    • Helped raise over $15,000 for charity across six marathons.

  6. Mar 2021 – Jul 2021

    Network Engineer & UX Design Consultant

    Whisker

    • Managed Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, NAS, RADIUS, and VPN servers.
    • Redesigned the IP addressing scheme and moved DHCP to Windows Server; provisioned RADIUS for VPN and Wi-Fi authentication.
    • Documented the network and servers in Jira, and helped simplify user flows in a mobile app with over 300,000 users.

  7. Apr 2018 – Dec 2019

    Information Technology Intern

    Oakland University Career Services

    • Built a virtual internship environment to replace paper records, then trained non-technical staff to run it.
    • Automated browser tasks with Python and Selenium and built Looker datasets for staff and public dashboards.

  8. Oct 2017 – Apr 2018

    Technology Services Intern

    Plante Moran

  9. Sep 2015 – Oct 2017

    System Administrator

    Oakland University, School of Engineering and Computer Science

Education

  • Completed 2023

    M.S. Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction

    Oakland University, Rochester, MI

  • Dec 2019

    B.S. Computer Science, HCI & System Administration

    Oakland University, Rochester, MI

Projects

Featured 2026 · Design, engineering, and maintenance

Detroit Alley Cats TNR Web App

A mobile-first web app that runs the Detroit Alley Cats Trap-Neuter-Return program. Approved volunteers find and sign up for jobs (trapping, transport, holding care, and returns), and admins use it to run the program. It replaces a shared spreadsheet and a wiki database. I designed it, led the build, and maintain it.

  • Job scheduling and sign-ups with list and calendar views, filters, and "train me" requests.
  • Emailed calendar invites, reminders, and change notices, plus a personal calendar feed.
  • Colony pages with maps, safety context, and a "needs attention" view.
  • A cat database with photos, and an equipment inventory.
  • Post-job reports with photos, comments, and @mentions.
  • An in-app guide library and a first-run tour.
  • Built with security and privacy in mind: passwordless sign-in, server-side privacy rules, photo metadata stripping, and a full security audit with fixes. Dark, high-contrast interface.
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Vite
  • Hono
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • D1
  • R2
  • Zod
  • Vitest
  • GitHub Actions

Public GitHub repo coming soon...

May 2022 · Design, engineering, and project management

AVFlight Tools

A tool for managing the critical data behind private airplane hangar leasing: leases, locations, planes, owners, and users.

  • Wrote user stories, flows, wireframes, and ER diagrams.
  • Designed the PostgreSQL schema and built the site with Flask, WTForms, and Flask-SQLAlchemy.
  • Hosted on an AWS EC2 instance with IIS and FastCGI.

Mockups (PDF)

Sep 2019 – Dec 2019 · UX and Android development

GrizzPark

An Android app that shows students which parking spots are free in Oakland University's three largest lots, using Raspberry Pis with cameras and a machine learning model trained from scratch.

  • Built the app in IntelliJ against a parking database server.
  • Designed audio and visual displays of parking availability.
  • Shipped with a six-person team using Agile Scrum.

GitHub

Apr 2018 – Dec 2019 · Design, engineering, and project management

Impact Downloader

A fully automated tool that generates any number of Looker queries, downloads the data, renames the files, and sorts them into folders on a network or local drive.

  • Automated Looker in Handshake with Python and Selenium.
  • Wrote the Looker queries for complex datasets.

GitHubRewrite

Oct 2022 · Lead designer

ACME Reporting Scheduler

A tool for scheduling automated emails that contain business reports. I designed the user flows and the wireframes and mockups used in client presentations, all in Adobe XD.

Mockups (PDF)

Sep 2022 · Lead designer

Azure Security Score Dashboard

A single dashboard for viewing the Azure Security Scores of many MSP/CSP clients. I worked with the development lead on user flows and produced the wireframes and mockups in Adobe XD.

Mockups (PDF)

More on GitHub

Publications & Research

My research looks at how dating apps can help prevent sexual violence by supporting consent, working directly with women and LGBTQ+ stakeholders.

  1. May 2023

    Designing Dating Apps for Sexual Violence Prevention and Consent Mediation Through the Promotion of Wanted Experiences

    Master's thesis · Oakland University

    PDF

  2. Apr 2023

    Online Dating as Context to Design Sexual Consent Technology with Women and LGBTQ+ Stakeholders

    Second author, principal investigator · ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

    ACM Digital LibraryPDF

  3. Apr 2022

    Human-AI Interaction for User Safety in Social Matching Apps: Involving Marginalized Users in Design

    Second author · Artificially Intelligent Technology for the Margins workshop, ACM CHI 2021

    arXivPDF

  4. Oct 2021

    Rethinking Dating Apps as Sexual Consent Apps: A New Use Case for AI-Mediated Communication

    First author, principal investigator · Companion Publication of CSCW 2021

    ACM Digital LibraryPDF

  5. Apr 2021

    Computer-Mediated Consent to Sex: The Context of Tinder

    Second author · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW)

    ACM Digital LibraryPDFConference talk

  6. Oct 2020

    Supporting Women in Online Dating with a Messaging Interface that Improves their Face-to-Face Meeting Decisions

    Co-author · Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

    ACM Digital LibraryPDF

  7. Oct 2019

    Towards a Taxonomy of Social VR Application Design

    Co-author · Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY)

    ACM Digital LibraryPDF

Let's build something together

Hiring, contracting, or just want to say hi? Email is the best way to reach me.

nickbfurlo@gmail.com