Curriculum Vitae

Mike McQuaid

Fractional CTPO/Principal Engineer and Homebrew Project Leader

Edinburgh-based product and engineering leader, ex-GitHub Principal Engineer (#232, 2013), with 18 years’ experience reducing developer friction and scaling open-source software used by tens of millions. Published author, writer and experienced conference speaker (50+ talks) on engineering, open-source, automation, remote work and Git. Leading product and engineering at Homebrew and led at Workbrew, with product engineering experience at GitHub (before they had product managers). Early GitHub Copilot reviewer with hands-on experience integrating AI-driven coding assistants and review tools to boost developer velocity. Extensive experience with async, remote-first international teams since 2009.

Experience

Mike McQuaid Consulting (2009 – Present)

Offer fractional CTO/CTPO and Principal Engineer services through remote or in-person engagements for growth-oriented tech companies.

  • Developer Velocity: define productivity metrics, streamline CI/CD pipelines and reduce developer workflow friction.
  • AI Coding Assistants: develop and implement adoption strategies and rollout playbooks for e.g. Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT and other LLMs.
  • Open-Source Strategy: advise on sustainable governance, community growth and commercial licensing models.
  • Staff+ Mentorship: define clear career paths and mentor senior and staff+ engineers to maximise their impact.

Homebrew — Project Leader (2009 – Present)

Homebrew is the de-facto macOS package manager with tens of millions of users worldwide.

  • Created binary bottles, highlighted in Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar keynote
  • Scaled CI infrastructure and release automation to support 10,000+ contributors
  • Brought project under Software Freedom Conservancy and later OpenCollective for non-profit status and fiscal sustainability
  • Mentored new maintainers and contributors via Google Summer of Code, MLH Fellowship and Outreachy programmes
  • Migrated Homebrew to GitHub Packages, partnering with GitHub’s internal teams

Workbrew

Homebrew Fellow and Advisor (2025 – Present)

Deliver fractional advisory and technical leadership to Workbrew, focused on seamless integration with Homebrew’s open-source ecosystem and solving complex engineering challenges.

  • Homebrew Fellow: funded to support my role as Homebrew Project Leader, primary liaison between Homebrew maintainers and Workbrew organisation.
  • Technical Advisor: provide strategic guidance and expert support on critical engineering and product decisions.

CTPO and Cofounder (2023 – 2025)

Workbrew brings the power of Homebrew to enterprise macOS fleets. As CTPO, set product direction, owned engineering execution and established company-wide processes.

  • Singlehandedly shipped first versions of Workbrew Console, Agent and Installer and secured first reference customer which resulted in raising $3.2m VC seed round with Heavybit in 2023.
  • Recruited and led an async, six-person product engineering team across five countries and three continents
  • Introduced Shape Up, achieving predictable product feature delivery while maintaining agility
  • Primarily responsible for achieving SOC 2 Type 1 compliance in 2024 and Type 2 in 2025.
  • Implemented DORA metrics and LLM-assisted code reviews which resulted in PR open-to-merge time of 0.5 days and > 35 PRs per engineer/month
  • Scaled platform to 1,725 managed devices (May 2025) and enterprise launch featured in TechCrunch
  • Embedded AI tools (ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot) across the org; designed an LLM-native hiring process referenced on LeadDev

GitHub (2013 – 2023)

Principal Engineer (2022 – 2023)

Guided company-wide productivity initiatives.

  • Increased deployment throughput by 33% (> 1,700 PRs/30 days) by leading the Merge Queue project and internal rollout
  • 1:1 engineering advisor to CTO/CSO; defined monolith-vs-microservice heuristics
  • One of first Copilot internal testers; shaped product metrics and competitive analysis
Staff Engineer (2020 – 2022)
  • Led engineering migration to Codespaces, cut ~375 dev-hours/week through engineering bootstrap improvements
  • Built new ownership tooling for code review, issue triage and on-call rotations now used by all of GitHub
  • Sunset GitHub Jobs and created reusable deprecation framework for future services
Senior Developer Advocate (2016 – 2018)
Senior Engineer (2013 – 2016, 2018 – 2020)

AllTrails — Full-Stack Engineer (2012 – 2013)

Built Rails/MySQL backend and CoffeeScript/SASS frontend; automated deployments for AWS, iPhone and Android.

KDAB — Technical Team Lead (2009 – 2012)

Led cross-platform Qt/C++ consulting projects, delivered on-site training worldwide and introduced Buildbot-based CI pipelines.

Mendeley — Lead Developer (2008 – 2009)

First non-founder hire; ported Mendeley Desktop to macOS/Linux and built cross-platform CI/CD.

BT — Software Engineer (2007 – 2008)

Developed high-performance network-analysis apps on IBM Cell processor; introduced CI and version control.

Google Summer of Code — KDE Contributor (2007)

Enhanced KBlog XML-RPC API and added blog-from-KOrganizer feature (shipped in KDE 4.1.0).

Wolfson Microelectronics — Intern (2006)

Authored WM8711 Linux-kernel driver (released in v2.6.26) and improved I2S/AC’97 audio drivers.

Publications

  • Git in Practice — Manning Publications, 2014

Honours and Awards

  • OpenUK “Social Influencers of Open Source” (2024)
  • JavaOne Rock Star (2014)

Education

  • BSc Computer Science and Management Science (2:1) — University of Edinburgh (2003 – 2007)

Personal

References

More available on request