Michael J. (Mike) Karels^[1] is an American software engineer and one of the key people in history of BSD UNIX.^{[citation needed]}

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.^{[citation needed]}

Later, Karels moved to BSDi (Berkeley Software Design) and designed BSD/OS, which was, for years, the only commercially available BSD style Unix on Intel platform. BSDi software asset was bought by Wind River in April 2001, and Karels joined Wind River as the Principal Technologist for the BSD/OS platform.^{[citation needed]}

In 2009, Karels was Sr. Principal Engineer at McAfee. In 2015 he worked for Intel and later for Forcepoint LLC.^{[citation needed]}