patrickmcd@gmail.com · Remote (US) · GitHub · LinkedIn

Experienced engineer with 10+ years designing, scaling, and operating cloud-native and IoT platforms. Proven track record owning critical systems, leading cross-team technical initiatives, and improving reliability, security, and developer productivity. Deep expertise in Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes, and distributed systems, with strong product intuition.

• Owned and evolved platform-critical services supporting security-sensitive data at scale
• Led architectural migrations from serverless to Kubernetes across multi-team systems
• Set engineering standards for APIs, data models, and developer experience
• Worked across product, infrastructure, and security boundaries to deliver reliable systems
• Mentored engineers and served as escalation point for complex system issues

• Design services to do as few things as possible, favoring clear boundaries over over-complication
• Treat product and engineering as a single problem-solving partnership with shared ownership of outcomes
• Build minimum lovable products (instead of minimum viable products) through rapid prototyping, frequent stakeholder feedback, and iterative refinement
• Great-functioning products with poor design are often experienced as bad products by non-technical users

Jul 2024 – Present · Remote

• Embedded with Capital One’s Velocity Black platform, owning data security and privacy pipelines
• Designed real-time detection and mitigation systems for highly sensitive human data under strict latency constraints using OCR
• Led performance and reliability testing strategy for distributed services
• Improved platform security posture via automated secret rotation and hardened workflows

Apr 2022 – May 2024 · Remote

• Technical lead for core IoT ingestion and API platform used by customer-facing mobile applications
• Owned backend architecture in Go, Node.js, and Protocol Buffers
• Led migration from AWS Lambda to Kubernetes and Knative, improving scalability and cost efficiency
• Established internal developer platform standards via Backstage
• Acted as primary technical partner for product and mobile teams

Aug 2018 – Apr 2022 · Remote

• Owned end-to-end IoT product strategy spanning hardware, firmware, cloud services, and analytics
• Designed and launched LTE-M and NB-IoT hardware products
• Led global infrastructure migration to Kubernetes
• Reduced platform downtime from approximately 24 hours per month to under 30 minutes per month
• Balanced technical architecture with customer and business constraints

Nov 2014 – Aug 2018 · Remote

• Designed control systems and analytics platforms for industrial production environments
• Delivered full-stack systems across embedded, backend, and UI layers

Apr 2013 – Nov 2014 · Dallas, TX

• Delivered PLC, HMI, and VFD solutions for industrial automation and water filtration systems
• Executed legacy system migrations and on-site commissioning

Jun 2011 – Apr 2013 · St. Louis, MO

• Led manufacturing control projects, including virtualization of production servers for large-scale facilities

Languages: Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, SQL
Cloud and Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Knative, Terraform, Serverless
Architecture: Distributed systems, event-driven platforms, IoT
Security: Data privacy, secrets management, secure data pipelines
Controls and Physical Systems: PLC and industrial automation systems; HMI and SCADA design and implementation; real-time and safety-critical system constraints; hardware–software integration, field reliability, and remote monitoring
Leadership: Technical strategy, cross-team collaboration, mentorship

B.S. in Electrical Engineering
University of Missouri, Columbia · May 2011