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Dan McAulay

Contact: 510-418-1326 | dan@app-vitals.com | GitHub

Summary​

Engineering leader with extensive experience building scalable, reliable systems across fintech, healthcare, and AI domains. Expertise in architecting AI-powered applications, leading technical teams, and establishing robust engineering processes.

Skills​

  • Seasoned architect, capable of dissecting complex problems and creating simple scalable solutions
  • Excellent software engineering skills, including system design, API design, testing and profiling
  • Able to analyze and diagnose low level software issues including those caused by thread contention, poor memory management, and/or ineffective disk and network usage

Languages: Go, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Java, C#, C, C++, Objective C
Databases: MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Memcached
AI/ML: LLM Integration, Prompt Engineering, Vector Databases, ML Observability, RAG Systems, Multimodal AI

Experience​

Founding Engineer, okWOW Inc.​

November 2024-Present

  • Leading a team of 6 engineers in designing and implementing AI-driven systems, establishing engineering best practices and development workflows
  • Architected and built a production-grade chat system with sophisticated context management and real-time capabilities
  • Designed streaming data architectures and pipelines optimized for real-time AI workloads and high-throughput data processing
  • Developed voice interface integration strategies and protocols for multi-modal AI interactions
  • Created frameworks for strategic prompt engineering and context augmentation with proprietary data
  • Built DevOps infrastructure including CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, and deployment strategies for AI systems

Principal Engineer, Alto Pharmacy​

July 2024-November 2024

  • Laid a foundation for Alto partnership integrations that focuses on keeping complex partnership logic out of the platform layer by developing common integration patterns and building extendable platforms
  • Documented data consistency problems that arise from an event based architecture at the producer and consumer layers and shared example patterns to prevent data loss or duplication

Staff Engineer, Alto Pharmacy​

August 2021-July 2024

  • Lead Alto's technical project review process to help ensure each new project adheres to our latest engineering standards for architecture, reliability and scalability
  • Designed and built Alto's engineering quality dashboard used to showcase reliability, scalability and maintainability by team or business domain
  • Extracted Alto's Doctors and Clinics service from the monolith to a separate service and built a platform to ease future service extraction - API schemas, RPC layer, shadowing, database replication, etc.
  • Performed Ruby (2.6 -> 2.7 -> 3.0 -> 3.1) and Rails (6.0 -> 6.1 -> 7.0) upgrade and built a system to ease future upgrades

Senior Engineer, Alto Pharmacy​

August 2020-August 2021

  • Designed and executed on Alto's next gen architecture by carving out better boundaries in a Rails monolith in order to improve performance, reliability, developer productivity and ownership
  • Lead monthly incident reviews to go over recent incidents (outages) and determine ways to prevent, detect and mitigate future incidents

Senior Engineer II, Uber​

June 2016-June 2020

  • Onboarded a new Earnings Infrastructure team in Amsterdam. Worked closely with San Francisco to build the team's domain context, ramp up execution, set a clear vision and define the responsibilities between SF and AMS Earnings teams
  • Led the effort to unify payment method onboarding across Uber Drivers, Riders, Couriers, Restaurants, Fleets and Freight- credit cards, bank accounts, etc. Designed and built a unified, secure and compliant system
  • Designed and built Uber's Go service framework to promote automation and common development patterns to help ease the burdens of context switching between services. Includes project structure, code layout, observability standards, testing mocks, factories, error wrapping and more

Senior Engineer, Uber​

June 2015-June 2016

  • Helped ship the initial version of the Driver newsfeed
  • Led the effort to make ratings and feedback at Uber more flexible and scalable. The service hosts ratings for Driver, Riders, Couriers, Restaurants, Menu Items, Freight Carriers and Freight Shippers
  • Built an internal Python Tornado MySQL driver and extended Uber's Schemaless database with new field types

Independent Contractor, SocialCode​

January 2015-June 2015

  • Implemented database and application monitoring via statsd/graphite/grafana
  • Analyzed database usage (MySQL) and proposed possible solutions
  • Built an online schema migration tool for MySQL/Django inspired by github.com/soundcloud/lhm

Speaker and Organizer, East Bay JavaScript Meetup Group​

May 2012-July 2017

Founder, Prix Fixe​

November 2013-June 2015

  • Building a new dining experience by pairing top chefs with unique venues
  • Built at LAUNCH Hackathon 2013 where we won 2nd place
  • Launched at LAUNCH Festival 2014
  • Website and API built using Node.js, MongoDB and Redis

Software Engineer, We Heart It​

April 2013-January 2015

  • One of four backend developers supporting 2M DAU and 600K requests per minute
  • Led migration from Solr to Elasticsearch
  • Managed our adoption of Cassandra
  • Presented at the SF Cassandra meetup
  • Built d_script to distribute long running DB jobs across multiple servers

Software Engineer, Embly (acquired by We Heart It)​

October 2012-April 2013

  • First backend engineer at a 9 team social commerce startup in San Francisco
  • Lead developer for Embly's thoughtfulness engine; built with Node.js and Embly's pipeline-stream. Uses Facebook Open Graph to identify important (gift-worthy) events in friends lives
  • Key contributor to Embly's web application built on Express, with Handlebars, MongoDB and Facebook Open Graph

Lead Architect, 3VR Security​

August 2006-October 2012

  • Technical lead for the 3VR video pipeline. This includes video capture, storing to disk, streaming and playback
  • Implemented lock-free memory pooling and thread scheduling to prevent thread contention in 3VR analytic pipeline
  • Led development for RTSP client/server implementations and doubled our network throughput by replacing our existing Live555 (VLC streaming library) implementation
  • Started 3VR Hack Day

Software Engineer, ESC​

May 2004-August 2006

  • Lead systems developer for ESC research team
  • Worked with remote team to help improve Object Character Recognition for shipping containers
  • Implemented TCP/IP communication standard between Intelligent Camera and SmartGate servers

Database Programmer, Lambert Consulting​

Summer 2003-Fall 2003

  • Developed a web-based utility that enables employees to create and edit different views for a Relational Database System

Research​

Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing, Prof. Lotfi Zadeh and Dr. Masoud Nikravesh
Fall 2003
Devise a program using soft computing, fuzzy logic and multi-agent technologies to determine movements for different agents depending on the location and speed of their target and their environment.

Education​

UC Berkeley
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Graduated May 2004