Curriculum Vitae

Mike McQuaid

CTPO and Homebrew Project Leader

Engineering and product leader, remote-first since 2009, with 19 years experience reducing developer friction and scaling open source software used by tens of millions. Currently CTPO at Administrate and Homebrew Project Leader, former GitHub Principal Engineer (employee #232) who led initiatives including Merge Queue and internal developer environment, cofounder and former CTPO of Workbrew. Diagnoses an organisation’s real constraints, publishes the plan, and then fixes a large share of it personally with AI coding assistants, agents and automated tooling. As comfortable rewriting a CI pipeline or a legacy application as managing four business functions and hard board conversations. Published author (Git in Practice), writer and frequent speaker (50+ talks) on engineering leadership, open source, automation, remote work and Git.

Experience

Administrate - CTPO (2025 - Present)

Improving the world’s best training management system where I:

  • Own product, engineering, support and implementation, having grown the remit from engineering as each function was brought under a single owner
  • Published a first-principles diagnosis of the engineering organisation in my first two weeks and then executed it: 60% fewer repositories, 99% fewer production errors, zero ongoing unresolved issues and an 80% reduction in mean security-alert age while maintaining ISO and SOC 2 compliance
  • Cut pull request to production from five working days to same-day by designing and building a pipelined merge queue that batches an order of magnitude more changes into each validated deployment
  • Took engineering engagement from 18th to 64th global percentile and eNPS from 11 to 60 in 9 months, and promoted leaders from within rather than hiring over them
  • Hit all department KPIs and >10x PRs throughput on primary repository while coming in 20% under budget with a smaller team than I inherited
  • Rebuilt support and implementation end to end: reviewed all 71 customer support agreements to ground SLA and priority terms in what we actually deliver, then shipped contractual SLA tracking, company-wide priority and incident definitions and 95% customer satisfaction
  • Worked well beyond engineering on commercial systems ownership, pricing and packaging, board reporting, compliance evidence and the marketing discoverability to AI tools
  • Drove agentic AI adoption across engineering and the wider company, from a standing start to the primary way work gets done
  • Built a documentation software factory of markdown authored in a repository and synced to the Zendesk help centre, the platform monorepo and soon the public website, with LLM-generated release notes and automated maintenance, plus sync layers across Notion, GitHub, Zendesk and the CRM so support, implementation and engineering work from one business source of truth
  • Remained a principal-level individual contributor throughout, personally authoring the error-reduction programme, merge queue work, an order-of-magnitude reduction in CI spend per build, and the automation above

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

OpenUK - Board Member (2026)

Strategic board member at OpenUK, the UK open technology industry body, helping drive sector growth, policy engagement and community development for open source and related technologies.

O’Reilly Media - Live Course Instructor (2025)

Designed and taught O’Reilly’s live course “AI and the Coding Interview”, helping engineers prepare for modern interview loops with and without AI/LLM tooling.

Workbrew

Homebrew Fellow and Advisor (2025 – 2026)

Provided limited independent advisory support relating to Homebrew and technical escalations.

CTPO and Cofounder (2023 – 2025)

As CTPO, set product direction, owned engineering execution and established company-wide processes.

  • I was described by one of our investors as “one of the best zero-to-one engineering leaders in the industry”.
  • As the sole engineer at the time, 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 the platform to 1,725 managed devices by May 2025 and supported the public launch featured in TechCrunch
  • Embedded AI tools (ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot) across the org; designed an LLM-native hiring process referenced on LeadDev

Mike McQuaid Consulting (2025)

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

  • Developer Velocity: multi‑week developer velocity deep dives, defining productivity metrics, optimizing CI/CD pipelines and eliminating workflow friction. TL;DR: makes your most expensive resource (your engineers) get more done in less time.
  • AI Coding Assistants: deliver focused deep‑dive evaluation and implementation 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.

Existing clients include startups, “Big Tech” notable software companies, financial companies and other consulting companies.

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