About Us
Move fast and build
things that last.
Engineers who ship for a living — and built Shipwright because running autonomous programming at enterprise quality required infrastructure nobody else had. Now we install it for you.
Our Story
Enterprise experience.
Startup intensity.
We've spent 40+ combined years building and leading engineering teams at companies like Uber and Alto Pharmacy. We've navigated bureaucracy, shipped distributed systems for millions of users, and learned what it takes to move fast at scale.
Now we're applying that experience to the biggest shift in software engineering since the cloud: autonomous programming. Most AI rollouts stall out in training decks and champion programs. We started there too — and learned that the real unlock isn't teaching people to use AI. It's installing agents that ship alongside them.
So we built Shipwright — a customizable system we install in your environment, configured to your codebase, with the same review and testing bar as human code. Dan and Dave get you landed. Your engineers run it.
The Team
Two velocity engineers. Decades of depth.
Dan McAulay
Co-Founder
20+ years building at scale. Former engineering leader at Uber, where he worked on distributed systems serving millions of users. Deep expertise in platform engineering, team building, and navigating complex organizations.
Dan brings the technical depth and organizational instinct that makes AI adoption work in practice — not just in demos.
Dave O'Dell
Co-Founder
20+ years of engineering leadership across enterprise and healthcare companies, including Alto Pharmacy. Specializes in engineering velocity, developer experience, and building systems that scale.
An AI-native practitioner who uses AI assistants daily to operate at startup velocity with enterprise quality. Hands-on expertise in making AI tools actually useful for real engineering work.
Our Approach
Principles, not playbooks.
Product, not curriculum
Training decks and champion programs don't change how an org ships. Installing a system that ships does. We bring the product — then the humans around it — rather than the other way around.
Context is infrastructure
AI tools are only as useful as the context they have. We build the foundation — architecture docs, shared patterns, conventions — that makes AI genuinely understand your codebase.
Ship first, strategize second
We deliver production code in Week 1, not PowerPoints. Strategy comes from doing the work and seeing what actually moves the needle for your team.
Two founders + the product
Two senior engineers plus the agent system we built. That combination runs multiple client engagements in parallel — which is why the bundle is product + operators, not one or the other.
Let's talk about your team.
30 minutes to understand where you are, where you want to be, and whether we're the right fit.
Book a Discovery Call