I have a passion for improving efficiency in software development, especially through automation: if a computer can do it a computer should do it. This allows my teams to spend more time on producing insights and innovation at scale.

Big fan of Haskell, the UNIX command line, Javascript, Docker, and especially Vim.

Vectra AI

Director of Software Engineering February 2022 → November 2024

• Led the Data Platform group, providing self-service infrastructure and tooling for data processing applications based on customer metadata from physical networks and cloud accounts, primarily deployed in AWS.
• Managed three geographically distributed teams across the US and Ireland, sharing on-call responsibilities to enhance operational resilience.
• Spearheaded the transformation of AI detection algorithms from daily batch processing to near real-time streaming, achieving a 100x improvement in processing time at 25% of the previous system’s cost.
• Reimplemented ETL processing to improve data freshness from 9 hours to 11 minutes. A 50x improvement in processing time.
• Improved deployment practices, transitioning from a monthly release cadence to on-demand releases two to three times a week, enhancing the team’s production operations.
• Introduced company-wide incident retrospectives to foster a culture of learning from production issues, contributing to stronger practices across the engineering organization and resolving ongoing outages.

Principal Engineer November 2020 → February 2022

• Guided the technical direction of the engineering function during the transition from on-premises hardware to cloud-based solutions, focusing on the interactive Search platform and cloud application security.
• Led the development of the Search Platform, leveraging the Gold Tier data lake hosted in AWS, and collaborated with Product, Frontend, and Backend teams to build a dedicated Data API team.
• Utilized Presto and Python for querying across multiple data sources, including Deltalake, MariaDB, and Kafka.
• Played a key role in migrating a significant on-premise appliance to the cloud (AWS), reviewing designs and processes to ensure compatibility and efficiency.
• Focused on security and infrastructure during the transition, prioritizing potential issues, automating verification of Kubernetes (EKS) and Terraform manifests, and coordinating with third-party penetration testing firms to validate security measures.

LetsGetChecked

Engineering Manager January 2020 → May 2020

• Led six development teams and the QA function, comprising nearly thirty members, to deliver a cloud-based health testing platform for home-use diagnostics.
• Managed a diverse range of projects, including the e-commerce storefront, customer-facing mobile apps, and integrations with labs and logistics for sample handling.
• Reorganized teams to align with the company’s structure, clarifying priorities and fostering focus on key innovation areas that had been overlooked.
• Guided the implementation of best practices for managing a live cloud environment, enhancing operational efficiency and responsiveness.

Jet.com (Walmart Subsidiary)

Associate Director Aug 2017 → January 2020

• Led a team focused on the Associate Delivery initiative, enhancing last-mile logistics to reduce shipping costs for urban millennial customers.
• Managed cross-functional teams across Dublin, Ireland, and Hoboken, New Jersey, as well as remote contractors, addressing leadership changes and technical debt.
• Oversaw daily operations, for Tier 1 services, maintaining a sub-10ms response time for the Estimated Delivery feature on Product pages
• Achieved zero PagerDuty alerts during Black Friday 2019, significantly improving system reliability.
• Drove technical direction and mentored engineers in functional programming (F#) and DevOps practices, ensuring robust architectural choices and risk management for microservices.
• Fostered a collaborative team environment, resolving tensions and advocating for technical debt management alongside product objectives, earning recognition for leadership effectiveness.

Melosity

Chief Technical Officer Nov 2015 → Jul 2017

• Led the development of a real-time collaborative music recording platform, enabling musicians to work together seamlessly in the browser.
• Oversaw product architecture and infrastructure, launching the platform to the public in September 2016.
• Utilized a tech stack including React, Haskell, and PostgreSQL, implementing a microservices architecture for continuous deployment.
• Employed Docker, Elastic Beanstalk, and Terraform for streamlined deployment processes.
• Instituted an agile development process based on Kanban, fostering collaboration among technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Conducted regular retrospectives and one-on-one meetings with the engineering team to enhance throughput and support professional development.

ServiceFrame

Principal Engineer May 2012 → Nov 2015

• Contributed to the development of a dashboarding and reporting platform for managing outsourced relationships, primarily in the Telecoms Managed Services sector.
• Developed a Single Page JavaScript client application using an in-house CoffeeScript framework, along with a .NET 4.5 C# backend and data integration pipelines using third-party ETL tools.
• Oversaw migration of infrastructure from co-location to AWS, implementing an Immutable Infrastructure deployment strategy with Vagrant, Puppet, and Docker.
• Enhanced front-end architecture by creating composable UI components that efficiently handle state changes and standardized URL serialization of UI state, allowing us to produce charts and data analyses for users in low bandwidth regions, particularly West Africa.
• Actively participated in continuous process analysis to improve project predictability and efficiency.

IBM

Staff Software Engineer Sept 2008 → May 2012

• Led the architecture and implementation of the XPages Mobile Controls project, enhancing the mobile web experience for Domino XPages applications.
• Collaborated with a team of 5-7 members, including developers, Quality Engineers, and UX experts, to create a single-page web application framework for mobile devices.
• Developed the module using Dojo Mobile controls, with significant enhancements for Notes Domino and XPages, leveraging Java Server Faces (JSF) on the backend.
• Contributed to the XPages Extension Library open-source project, including authoring a chapter for the related book.
• Presented on topics such as mobile development and graphics programming at major conferences, including Lotusphere 2012.
• Released the open-source library xspUnit, enabling unit testing of Server Side JavaScript libraries within XPages.

Deecal International (acquired by FirstData)

Senior Full Stack Developer Nov 2006 → Sept 2008

• Contributed to the development of d.cal, a suite of applications for managing corporate credit cards, enabling real-time transaction monitoring and expense claims.
• Improved the application’s architecture by transitioning from an iframe-based design to a more cohesive front-end structure, enhancing user experience and performance.
• Leveraged expert front-end development skills to introduce concepts such as AJAX, Unobtrusive JavaScript, and jQuery to the team, improving processes and knowledge in front-end technologies.
• Collaborated with back-end systems using J2EE (WebLogic, later Tomcat) and Oracle 10g database, facilitating effective communication between front-end and back-end components.
• Supported the team through the transition of Deecal International after its acquisition by First Data in 2008.

Trade Exchange Network

Software Developer Feb 2004 → Nov 2006

• Developed and maintained the frontend code for consumer prediction market sites, including intrade.com and tradesports.com, focusing on financial and public policy contracts as well as sports betting.
• Designed and implemented an AJAX trading interface that provided real-time price updates and enabled users to buy and sell contracts, ensuring speed and accuracy for transactions during fast-paced events.
• Transitioned the website design from table-based layouts to CSS, significantly improving the efficiency of producing high-quality reskinned sites for internal corporate markets, reducing turnaround time from weeks to hours.
• Gained early responsibility for large parts of the system due to demonstrated proficiency in web development and UNIX systems administration.

regexicon.com

A common problem I’ve noticed when code reviewing regular expressions is not that they don’t match the intended pattern, but rather that they will match something unexpected. I wrote this web service to help non-expert regular expression authors identify these issues by showing a selection of strings that would match a given regex.

You can try it out at http://regexicon.com/. Code available at https://github.com/lorcanmcdonald/RegexCandidates

Dublin City University

BSc. Computer Applications (Software Engineering) Sept 1999 → May 2003

• Focused on practical aspects of software engineering and theoretical topics in computer science.
• Final year project: Implemented a neural network for classifying emails as spam or non-spam.

Key Modules:

• Software Engineering
• Languages and Computability
• Cryptography
• Graphics Programming
• Systems Analysis

Work Placement:

• Completed a six-month work placement with Crannog Software, specializing in network monitoring software.