Curriculum Vitae

Mike McQuaid

Workbrew CTPO and Homebrew Project Leader

Edinburgh-based product and engineering leader, ex-GitHub Principal Engineer (#232, 2013), with 18 years of experience reducing developer friction and scaling open-source to tens of millions of users. Delivered 50+ conference talks, published author and writer on engineering, open-source, automation, remote work and Git. Lead product and engineering at Workbrew and Homebrew, with product engineering experience at GitHub (before they had product managers). Early GitHub Copilot reviewer with hands-on experience introducing AI-driven code assistants, reviews and chat tools to improve team velocity. Working on async remote-first international teams since 2009.

Experience

Workbrew — CTPO and Cofounder (2023 – Present)

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

  • Singlehandedly shipped first versions of Workbrew Console, Agent and Installer
  • Recruited and led an async, six-person team across five countries and three continents
  • Introduced Shape Up, achieving predictable feature delivery while maintaining agility
  • Led effort which achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance in 2024 (and on track for 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

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

Mike McQuaid Consulting (2009 – Present)

I provide part-time remote and in-person targeted engagements for startups and large engineering organisations.

  • Developer velocity – implement metrics, CI/CD pipelines and low-friction workflows
  • AI coding assistants – roll-out playbooks for Copilot, ChatGPT and internal LLMs
  • Open-source strategy – governance models, community health, commercial licensing

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 for 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