Eric Mcdonald's Location
Greater Seattle Area, United States, United States
Eric Mcdonald's Contact Details
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About Eric Mcdonald
Trying to move away from infrastructure/SRE and back towards software development again with a focus on architecture and technical leadership.Have developed a passion for AI language models and the ecosystem surrounding them since early 2023, while trying to keep some distance and sanity in face of all the hype. Nearly all of my side projects have been AI-interfaced or AI-assisted since the start of my interest in this area. Have also successfully integrated AI into various facets of my paid employment. Have made community and open source contributions in areas such as text embeddings, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context window management, conversation management, and AI tool use.
Eric Mcdonald Work Experience Details
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Head Of InfrastructureBlackbird.Ai Jul 2023 - PresentNew York, Ny, UsManager and technical lead of combined core infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE team.Developed infrastructure and cybersecurity strategy. Also, influence on overall architecture.Successfully leading push to reduce number of cloud service providers and continuous integration platforms to consolidate expertise and maintenance. Initiated weekly incident postmortem reviews and improved culture around incident response. Created and led initiative to improve service level indicators and objectives; led effort to refine service level agreements in conjunction with the Sales and CS teams. Introduced an infrastructure-as-code discipline.Introduced attribute-based access control and role-based access control. Provided education on Principle of Least Privilege and enacted it across a number of systems. Technical interviewer for CISO, VP, and Director candidates. Provided internal penetration testing, including tests for AI exploits. Leading SOC 2 certification efforts as well as longer term preparations. -
Unit LeadGro Intelligence May 2022 - Jun 2023New York, UsFounder and first manager / tech lead for the Production Operations team. Network andobservability architecture. AWS cost monitoring and reduction. Improvement ofinfrastructure-as-code capabilities.Founder and first manager / tech lead for the Platform team. CI and developer support tooling.Backend architecture. Cloud architecture. -
Principal EngineerMarqeta, Inc Jul 2021 - Apr 2022Oakland, California, UsAWS architecture. Reduction of failure domains. Technical lead on rollout of infrastructure-as-code automation system. -
Lead EngineerMarqeta, Inc Dec 2019 - Jul 2021Oakland, California, UsTerraform. Kubernetes. AWS. Drone. Hashicorp Vault. Github Enterprise. Okta.Job focus is to design and implement tooling for other engineers at the company to facilitate automation across the software development lifecycle and to generally guide the company towards a solid systems architecture. Also have a strong interest in security.Designed and built modules in Terraform for automating the creation of AWS accounts, VPCs, DBs with cross-region replication, and X.509 certificate issuance/renewal. Proposed and implemented containerized development environments and utilities containers to reduce support footprint and standardize tool sets across engineering laptops.Very active reviewer of designs and code across the engineering organization. Have framed options and led the decision-making process at a number of crucial junctures, including account/VPC segregation, Kubernetes namespaces, and DNS architecture. Have been critical to timely resolution of several outages.
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Senior EngineerQualtrics Feb 2016 - Oct 2019Provo, Ut And Seattle, Wa, UsFounder of the Development Operations team in the Qualtrics Seattle office, although hired as a software engineer and not a systems engineer. Initially supported close to 50 software engineers by myself. Co-founder of the Developer Tooling team, which spans multiple offices.Technical lead on various projects, ranging from internal security to storage systems to service orchestration. Primary architect and implementer of the elastic compute infrastructure and orchestration system used to deploy services and run batch jobs; custom development of in-house authorization, accounting, change management, and monitoring integrations for this system. Primary architect and implementer of the PKI, security bastions, directory services, and account management tools used within the Engineering division. Also, work on configuration management, Docker and container technologies, monitoring, etc.... -
Software EngineerNetapp Mar 2015 - Jan 2016San Jose, California, UsWork on a hybrid on-premises and cloud backup product.Familiarity with the storage APIs of all major cloud vendors, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Rewrote an Amazon S3 emulator, used for internal testing, from the ground up, making a ten-fold increase in performance, better load scaling, and new features in the process.Regarded as one of the top Python experts on our team of 40+ engineers.Focus on software performance analysis and tuning, including examination of Linux kernel internals.Took a lead role in preparing the future software stack of the product. Also developed expertise in the build systems and manufacturing process of the product.Mentoring junior developers. -
Software Development EngineerAmazon Jun 2013 - Feb 2015Seattle, Wa, UsDeveloped system for rapid retrieval of large quantities of sales data from heterogeneous data sources for presentation in advanced visualizations. Extensively interfaced with Amazon Web Services; augmented a concurrent query-processing engine. Designed and wrote reusable system component to check the status of batch jobs preparing data updates from the corporate data warehouse.Worked with an Agile team of data engineers, software development engineers, and web developers. Regularly interacted with members of the business team for our product and provided demonstrations of work accomplished. Also, responded to and resolved issues raised by customers using our product. -
Hpc/Cloud Software EngineerMichigan State University Jan 2012 - Jun 2013East Lansing, Mi, UsWorked for the Genomics, Evolution, and Development Laboratory, funded by the Computer Science and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics departments.Added thread-safety and NUMA utilization to a bioinformatics software suite used for pre-filtering Big Data. Helped users from around the world install and use this suite.Developed and documented a method of using the Galaxy bioinformatics software on Amazon EC2 via MIT StarCluster. Integrated software produced by the lab into Galaxy.Taught seminars on Mathematica and Python to faculty and grad student researchers.Oversaw the computational activities of four undergraduate research visitors in the summer of 2012.Wrote a book chapter on the processing of Big Data in bioinformatics. -
Hpc Software EngineerMichigan State University Feb 2010 - Dec 2011East Lansing, Mi, UsWorked for the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research at the university. (This position was a joint appointment with the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.)Administered an Infiniband-networked grid, consisting of 400+ nodes with 3,000+ CPU cores and around 15,000 GPU cores, housed within the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) at MSU.Assisted a community of about 300 active users. Provided education via seminars and interest groups. Resolved issues and facilitated use of HPCC systems via personal in-office consultations and a ticketing system.Helped users build, run, debug, and tune research codes on the HPCC systems. Also installed and configured a number of pieces of popular research software and documented how to use them in the HPCC context. And, created or enhanced many environment modules for user software.Diagnosed and resolved file system, networking, and scheduling issues across the service stack.Managed internal transition from Subversion to Git. Also, created infrastructure for provisioning public and private SCM repositories to users and their external collaborators.Debugged and patched software in production use, including bcfg2, GNU modules, and TORQUE.Performed various systems administration duties: remote administration and provisioning, automated configuration management, package management, etc....Performed miscellaneous software development: improved and augmented user account and license management tools, added new functionality for aggregating and reporting batch job statistics, etc....Managed three to four student employees.
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Hpc Software EngineerMichigan State University Feb 2010 - Dec 2011East Lansing, Mi, UsWorked for the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). (This position was a joint appointment with the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research at the university.)Modified an OpenMP-based nuclear shell model code to work across multiple nodes using MPI.Gave talks about my work at three US Department of Energy SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) meetings.Provided support for NSCL, Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, and Department of Physics and Astronomy users with high performance computing (HPC) issues.
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Programmer/Analyst (Part-Time Consultant)Central Michigan University May 2007 - Feb 2010Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsActed in a casual consulting role to the Physics Department. Some work was done for free, but I was also paid at a consulting rate for several projects.Helped with telescope control system upgrade.Planned and executed upgrade of the department's mail server.Occasionally supervised student employees in activities pertaining to the management of the department's compute clusters and infrastructure.Planned and successfully executed the relocation of the department's compute clusters to the campus data center. Planning included calculation of power and AC requirements, the production of a detailed transition plan, and integration with a different set of network and KVM switches. -
Programmer/Analyst (Temporary Consultant)Central Michigan University Mar 2009 - May 2009Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked for the Office of Information Technology division of the university.Further documentation and development of rules engine and user interface for a student self-service Web application.Trained SAP functional analysts and programmers to take over maintenance and long-term development of a project.
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Programmer/AnalystCentral Michigan University Sep 2007 - Dec 2008Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked for the Office of Information Technology division of the university.Worked extensively with business offices and academic units to develop a comprehensive set of specifications for a degree audit system.Used ABAP, Javascript, CSS, and SAP's Business Server Pages (BSP) technology and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern to develop a Web-based student self-service application.Trail-blazed adoption of new technologies on university's SAP software suite, particularly in the area of Student Lifecycle Management (SLcM), exposing RFCs as web services using WSDL and SOAP, developing a service repository to support a SOA, and developing proof-of-concept applications for use in a SAP portal as WebDynpros. Educated other developers in these technologies.Researched and recommended portal federation strategies and technologies for unifying the Microsoft and SAP software stacks in use by the central IT organization. Created proof-of-concept Sharepoint WebParts as part of strategy exploration. Educated other developers about this.
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Graduate Research AssistantCentral Michigan University Jun 2006 - May 2007Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsConstructed and administered multiple Linux clusters for computational physics.Programmed applications to perform systems administration tasks and the extraction and manipulation of scientific data.Administered computer lab of Windows workstations with Linux virtual machine guests. Administered Windows servers as domain controllers, SMB file and print servers, and IIS Web hosts.As part of M.S. in Physics thesis project, developed software to aid in solid state physics research. Extensively employed Mathematica for software prototyping and rapid scientific application development.
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Associate ScientistNational Center For Atmospheric Research Jul 2003 - May 2006Boulder, Colorado, UsWorked for the High Altitude Observatory division.Developed simulation codes in Fortran 90 for solar magnetic activity cycle modeling and prediction. Developed visualization codes in RSI IDL. Created models in Mathematica and developed a means of automatically generating Fortran 90 code from Mathematica notebooks; this included the automatic generation of properly coded numeric differences from differential equations.Presented my results at an American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting and at an international solar physics meeting. Also attended American Astronomical Society (AAS) meetings.Helped colleagues with Mathematica, RSI IDL, and various computer-related issues. -
Programmer/Analyst (Student)Central Michigan University Jan 2000 - Jun 2003Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked for the Physics Department.Primary administrator of a compute cluster of DEC Alphas used by condensed matter and nuclear theorists and quantum chemists. Performed all hardware maintenance on these machines, plus much of the initial configuration. Wired and configured toroidal mesh of SCI interconnects. Worked with Alpha SRM console firmware; built Linux kernel modules for SCI interface; configured ScaliMPI and LAM MPI to work across cluster.Administered a heterogeneous collection of Unix platforms: Linux, Solaris, OSF/1 and Irix. Maintained and installed astronomical software (IRAF, etc...) on Solaris workstations. Planned and helped execute transition from Solaris and OSF/1 to Linux.Administered Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 workstations; planned and executed upgrade from Windows NT4 to Windows 2000 in computer lab and of faculty workstations. Implemented and managed semi-automated deployments of new software. Maintained VMware Workstation on Windows hosts for Linux guests and vice versa.Scripting/programming of small applications in bash, sed, awk, and C to perform systems administration tasks and extraction and manipulation of scientific data.Networking- and security-related configuration and analysis.
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Undergraduate ResearcherNational Center For Atmospheric Research May 2002 - Aug 2002Boulder, Colorado, UsWorked at the High Altitude Observatory division as part of a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU).Modified a solar physics global MHD simulation code written in Fortran 77 to experiment with countercirculating meridional flows. Wrote RSI IDL code to visualize the results. Gave a presentation of my work to 20 researchers at the end of the research visit.Helped all of the other undergraduate researchers with the computer-oriented aspects of their projects.
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Software Engineer (Student)Dcg, Inc. May 1997 - Jan 2000Developed Windows software for oil and chemical industries. Designed and implemented user interfaces in Visual Studio; developed many parameterized queries and integrated reports using Crystal Reports; and interfaced with Microsoft Access and SQL Server database back-ends.Provided customer support to callers and visiting clients. -
Software Engineer (Student, Casual)Central Michigan University May 1999 - Aug 1999Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked evenings and weekends to develop an integrated telescope and CCD camera control system for the astronomers in the Physics Department.Interfaced with telescope computer via RS-232. Interfaced with CCD camera controller via IEEE-488 (GPIB).Produced imaging output in standards-compliant FITS format.
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Programmer/Analyst (Student)Central Michigan University Sep 1996 - May 1997Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked for the College of Extended Learning (now ProfEd).Developed Web application in Java for work order processing by college's internal units.Helped upgrade server systems from Windows NT 3.5 to Windows NT 4 and deploy Microsoft BackOffice. Helped upgrade desktop systems from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.Provided user support.
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Programmer/Analyst (Student)Central Michigan University Mar 1996 - Sep 1996Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, UsWorked for the information systems section within the financial department of the Facilities Management and Physical Plant division of the university.Performed routine systems administration tasks, including printer maintenance, print queue monitoring and adjustment (on Novell Netware), and user administration on shared AIX system.Helped in the development of a work order tracking application.Helped transition from IBM 3151 terminals to Windows 95 PCs with terminal emulators to connect to campus mainframe.Provided user support.
Eric Mcdonald Skills
Python
Linux
High Performance Computing
Software Engineering
Software Development
Hpc Systems Administration
Hpc Software Development
Mpi
C++
Bash
Big Data
Linux System Administration
Git
Github
Fortran
Metagenomics
Scientific Computing
C
Physics
Simulations
Amazon Ec2
Openmp
Regular Expressions
Bioinformatics
Configuration Management
Unix Operating Systems
Unix Shell Scripting
Technical Writing
Software Documentation
Subversion
Mathematica
Computer Hardware
Torque
Gnu Autotools
Gnu Make
Cloud Computing
Wsgi
Astrophysics
Nuclear Physics
Astronomy
Electronics
Genomics
Autotools
Automated Software Testing
Mathematics
Eric Mcdonald Education Details
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Central Michigan UniversityAnd Physics
Frequently Asked Questions about Eric Mcdonald
What company does Eric Mcdonald work for?
Eric Mcdonald works for Blackbird.ai
What is Eric Mcdonald's role at the current company?
Eric Mcdonald's current role is Senior Principal Engineer.
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What is Eric Mcdonald's direct phone number?
Eric Mcdonald's direct phone number is +138520*****
What schools did Eric Mcdonald attend?
Eric Mcdonald attended Central Michigan University.
What skills is Eric Mcdonald known for?
Eric Mcdonald has skills like Python, Linux, High Performance Computing, Software Engineering, Software Development, Hpc Systems Administration, Hpc Software Development, Mpi, C++, Bash, Big Data, Linux System Administration.
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