Ian Macartney
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
San Francisco, United States
Toptal member since July 22, 2022
Ian is a Stanford graduate with degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering. He gained UI/UX sensibilities as an iOS developer, engineering and debugging rigor through firmware and hardware consulting, and technological breadth from freelancing. Ian enjoys collaborating with stakeholders and proactively identifies novel opportunities. Experienced in Greenfield and legacy environments, he is skilled in back-end best practices and scalable development after four years at Dropbox.
Portfolio
Experience
- Git - 12 years
- Linux - 10 years
- Python - 8 years
- Microservices - 3 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 3 years
- Go - 2 years
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - 2 years
- TypeScript - 1 year
Work Experience
Staff Engineer in Developer Experience
Convex
- Built best practices for the Convex platform, codified in npm libraries like `convex-helpers` for, e.g., migrations, rate limiting, Zod, and sessions, along with blog posts on stack.convex.dev.
- Developed open-source local-first sync implementations for collaborative document editing, both as a sync protocol for Automerge and ProseMirror, powering apps like labs.convex.dev/jotion.
- Designed and implemented AI Town (convex.dev/ai-town) based on a research paper. It was a novel serverless game engine with AI agents talking and storing memories in relational database tables and a vector database in collaboration with a16z.
Contract Software Engineer
Curative
- Increased user features to find COVID-19 testing and vaccines locations on an interactive map and configure location info shown on a detail page.
- Improved the software and fixed the bugs by initiating research interviews with nurses and scribes who used the software on a vaccination site.
- Built back-end APIs and used React and TypeScript to contribute to the front end.
Contract Software Engineer
The New York Times
- Built a Slackbot prototype for public launch to improve user-sharing articles on Slack, with custom unfurl showing curated content and top links.
- Created a cloud pipeline and storage architecture to orchestrate compute-heavy conversions with a flexible API optimized for ML iteration speed.
- Collaborated with design, senior editor, copy, and engineers to communicate goals and progress frequently, adapting the scope while learning from each prototype.
Senior Software Engineer
Dropbox
- Designed and built micro-service infrastructure to preview user content, migrated all traffic with 10+ thousand RPS, and refactored and deleted legacy code to improve the new service's availability, extensibility, observability, and security.
- Led the team technically and stepped in as a manager periodically while producing more code than anyone on the team.
- Led the previews team for years while collaborating with numerous units, from features and emails for the photo-oriented Carousel product to the cloud document Paper product.
Project History
Vax Standby
https://vaxstandby.com/I developed the back end and leveraged Google Cloud Platform for hosting, Firestore for storage, and Twilio for messaging.
Education
Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University - Stanford, CA, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Stanford University - Stanford, CA, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, Asyncio
Tools
Git, CAD, SOLIDWORKS, Bazel, Celery, NPM
Languages
Python 3, Python, Go, TypeScript, C
Paradigms
Microservices
Platforms
Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Twilio, Mapbox, Firebase
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redis, Cloud Firestore, PostgreSQL, Databases
Other
Algorithms, Data Structures, Firmware, Physics, Linear Algebra, Linear Control Systems, Mechatronics, Robotics, Electronics, Slackbot, Full-stack, Convex
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