Josh McDade
Engineering leader.
Platform thinker.
Force multiplier.
Josh McDade
Engineering leader.
Platform thinker.
Force multiplier.
About
I've been building software for nearly 20 years, with over 12 of those leading engineering teams and organizations. I've held roles from Tech Lead to VP of Engineering, and I stay hands-on no matter the title — architecting systems, reviewing designs, and writing code alongside my teams.
My work spans product engineering, platform, infrastructure, security, and data. I've built products from zero to one, decomposed monoliths into microservices, and stood up the DevOps foundations that let teams ship with confidence. More recently, I've been focused on using AI to multiply engineering output — not as a buzzword, but as a real operational lever.
I care about building organizations where engineers do their best work. That means empowered teams with real ownership, strong technical foundations, and a bias toward leverage — finding the interventions that make everything downstream easier.
Experience
Aiwyn
Own all platform engineering, data engineering, DevOps, and two product engineering teams. On the Senior R&D Leadership team, partnering with product and design execs on technical strategy.
Key highlights
- Hands-on architect and primary IC of the Translation Engine — an ETL pipeline ingesting data from messy upstream systems into a clean, uniform data architecture powering all downstream products
- Lead architect and founding engineer of Aiwyn Tax, building tax automation software from zero to one
- Rolled out and coached Empowered Product Teams across the org, shifting teams from feature factories to real product ownership
- Champion of AI-native workflows across engineering as a member of the AI Vanguard group
Python, FastAPI, AWS, Pulumi, PostgreSQL, GitHub Actions
Carbon Health
Led engineering for a new Home-Based Care business line. Built zero-to-one virtual care programs for diabetes management and mental health that unlocked a new revenue stream.
Key highlights
- Architected a real-time data pipeline ingesting historical and live CGM data, built to handle tens of thousands of new data points per minute
- Helped establish standards for safely extracting modules from the EMR monolith into new microservices with clear ownership boundaries
- Joined a performance task force and reduced response times by orders of magnitude (30s → under 1s) on high-traffic endpoints
- Regularly stepped outside my org into platform engineering and DevOps to build shared infrastructure that increased velocity across 120+ engineers
Scala, Kotlin, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Grafana, Terraform, AWS
SpaceIQ
Three promotions in under four years. Grew from a single team to multiple product engineering and DevOps teams while staying hands-on throughout.
Key highlights
- Led cross-team effort to build a common microservices layer abstracting over 3 different office-space management products
- Owned and upgraded the Kubernetes clusters running the platform
- Built CI/CD pipelines and a custom Slack bot for multi-cluster deploys and monitoring
- Mentored junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, 1:1s, and career development
Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Terraform, PostgreSQL, AWS
Speed Digital
Lead architect across the full product suite: dealer management, live auctions, public vehicle marketplace, and a dealer website hosting platform.
Key highlights
- Cut AWS infrastructure costs by over 70% with Auto Scaling Groups, spot instances, and automated scheduling
- Adopted Kubernetes early (2015–2016) for container orchestration in production
- Built CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and Slack that replaced manual deployments
- Stood up an observability stack so the team could catch production issues before customers did
Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS
Previous experience (2007–2015) is on LinkedIn.
How I Work
I'm an AI power user. Most of my work happens from the terminal — Claude Code, Codex, Wispr Flow — and I rarely leave it. I believe AI is a genuine multiplier for almost everything we do, not just a productivity hack for writing boilerplate.
I build micro-apps constantly to think through problems. Sometimes they stay small; sometimes they grow into something surprisingly capable. What I love is that the level of effort stays low either way. The ratio of insight to investment has fundamentally changed.
I'm rarely not running multiple agents in parallel. But 25 years of writing code means I still have a sharp eye for what's clean and what isn't. When agents produce code that smells wrong — unclear abstractions, unnecessary complexity, poor readability — I catch it. And rather than just telling it to fix the output, I improve the skills and context the agent works with, so the problem doesn't happen next time. The system gets better, not just the code.
I love surveying an organization for where there's friction, inefficiency, and things that just don't work well. The challenge of finding those pressure points and making people's lives meaningfully better — that's what gets me out of bed. Whether it's a broken deployment pipeline, a team stuck in a feature factory, or an engineering org that hasn't figured out how to use AI as more than a novelty — I want to find the highest-leverage intervention and make it happen.