Josh McDade

About Josh McDade

I have been developing software professionally for almost 20 years and as a hobby for almost 25 years. I am dedicated to adapting my craft to meet the demands of the modern landscape, staying at the forefront of technology and best practices to lead organizations that deliver high-quality products with maximum efficiency.I believe in the power of AI-driven leverage at scale. I stay current with the latest AI tooling for coding, product ideation, and productivity. Whether automating complex engineering cycles or using agentic frameworks to accelerate product discovery, I focus on integrating these tools to multiply the impact of every team member.With over 12 years of leadership experience as a VP of Engineering, Director, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, and Tech Lead, I have led organizations of 30+ people across the entire engineering spectrum. I partner closely with product, design, and executive teams to align technical strategy with business outcomes. I have built and operated Empowered Product Teams and served on business-line trios that coach and advise these teams. I take pride in hiring and developing high-performing engineering organizations- Full-Stack Product Engineering: Delivering user-focused features with rapid iteration- Infrastructure and DevOps: Building scalable foundations and deployment pipelines- Security: Ensuring protection and compliance across the technical stack- AI and Developer Productivity: Building tools that let engineers focus on high-value work- Platform and Data Engineering: Designing core services and data architectures for modern applications.I maintain hands-on expertise across the full stack- Languages and Frameworks: Python (FastAPI, Pydantic), Scala (Typelevel), Kotlin, Java, Ruby on Rails, Javascript (Node.js, React, Next.js)- Cloud Infrastructure: AWS and GCP. Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi, AWS CDK, and Terraform- Architecture: Functional programming, distributed systems, and high-availability design with Kubernetes and Docker- Data and Observability: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana- CI/CD: GitHub Actions and modern orchestration tools.I seek opportunities to combine my foundational engineering experience with modern AI workflows to lead an organization to its next stage of growth.

Experience

1. VP of Platform Engineering

   Aiwyn

   Jul 2023 — Present

   As VP of Engineering, I led multiple product engineering teams, platform engineering, DevOps, and security. I served on the Senior R&D Leadership team, partnering with product and design executives to set technical strategy and drive business outcomes.I played a key role in rolling out and coaching Empowered Product Teams across the organization, helping teams shift from feature factories to outcome-driven units with real ownership.I helped champion AI-native workflows across the entire org and was a member of our AI Vanguard group, where I experimented with emerging tools, shared learnings, and drove adoption of AI-powered practices to accelerate engineering velocity and product discovery.

Education

• Western Carolina University

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Applied Mathematics

  2007 — 2010

Skills

• Soap
• Kubernetes
• Mvc
• Software Development
• Scrum
• Ansible
• Javascript
• Uml
• Akka
• Nginx
• Html
• Docker
• Unix
• Ruby on Rails
• Sql Injection
• Scala
• Devops
• Software Engineering
• Xml
• Rest
• Json
• Css
• Html5
• Rspec
• Git
• Software Modeling
• Object Oriented Design
• Sql
• Linux
• Ajax
• Test Driven Development
• Databases
• Php
• Design Patterns
• Java
• Ruby
• Soa
• Agile Methodologies
• Node.js
• Mysql