My name is Bryan McCormick.
I’m a technical engineering leader who is passionate about building great teams and creating products that solve customer’s needs. I have led software engineering teams at various stages and environments, from very early-stage startups to public companies as well as a traditional office or wholly distributed.
I’ve also worked as a full-stack software engineer specializing in building scalable web applications and distributed systems. Comfortable working with data durability guarantees in distributed systems, business logic in an app server, or UI components in Javascript / React.
Experience
Software Engineering Manager and Tech Lead – Rocana
May 2014 – January 2018
Rocana provides next-generation monitoring software that eliminates scalability and performance limits for analyzing and visualizing all log, metric, and all other types of machine-generated data across the customer’s infrastructure. As a Software Engineering Manager, I am focused on creating a healthy, productive, distributed work environment for a team of engineers creating an awesome product. As a Technical Lead, I’m also responsible for architecture and technical direction of the application part of the Rocana solution.
- Brought on as the first employee, I then hired, managed and led a team of 8 engineers across US and Canada responsible for application development and testing.
- Continually iterate on our process to improve team health and productivity, including how we handle scoping, prioritization, testing, code reviews, and releases.
- We have developed a scalable event ingestion framework capable of ingesting 100+ TB of event data/day.
Technical Marketing Engineer – Coraid
August 2012 – April 2014
Coraid delivered a software-defined storage and networking solution on scale-out hardware. My responsibilities included creating and testing optimized storage solutions for Global 2000 accounts. I functioned as a trusted advisor to the sales engineers and customers and was involved in scoping, design, testing, and building of Coraid Storage reference architectures for applications such as VMware, OpenStack, Red Hat, and ZFS.
- Setup public facing test lab that demonstrated using Coraid Storage with OpenStack. I characterized the performance of this solution under different workloads.
- Setup test harnesses and completed the certification process for VMware with Coraid Storage.
- Received Coraid Engineering Award for Excellence.
Founder – JBMLabs
March 2008 – December 2012
JBMLabs was a software engineering consulting firm. My focus was web application development and performance testing of solutions.
Software Engineering Manager – CNET Networks
February 2007 – March 2008
Webshots was one of the largest public photo-sharing websites at the time with over 500M hi-res images and 40M registered users. Webshots served 55M page views a day to 3M unique users. My responsibilities included managing and mentoring both software and QA engineers, performing design and code reviews, and developing new features.
- Hired and managed a team of 8 software and QA engineers.
- Worked with QA engineers to significantly expand the automated testing of the website.
- Helped transition Webshots to American Greetings. This involved extensive training of AG employees and knowledge transfer of site operations.
Software Engineering Manager and Lead Engineer – YouService
September 2005 – January 2007
YouService was a start-up focusing on distributed address book management. My responsibilities included ownership of design and architecture of the YOUnite server infrastructure, creating specifications for and managing outsourcing teams in Russia and the US, setup, and implementation of software engineering methodologies and maintain task queues and prioritization.
- Hired and managed a team of 7 software and QA engineers.
- Designed and developed a core transaction engine for processing YOUnite client transactions.
- Set up tools to support and promote good software development practices. These included code management strategies, continuous integration, JUnit for testing, and a custom framework for application performance monitoring.
Lead Software Engineer – CNET Networks
September 2003 – September 2005
Webshots was one of the largest public photo-sharing websites at the time with 500M+ hi-res images and 40M registered users. Webshots served 55M page views a day to 3M Uniques. My responsibilities included designing a scalable, maintainable website architecture. Maintaining a high level of code quality, setting standards, and design for new applications.
- Converted the community portion of the website from a static HTML and Perl CGI system to a servlet application that allowed the website to more than triple in page views from 12M per day to 45M over a six month period in addition to being completely dynamic.
- Designed and built photo search application that increased the searchable index size from 6M to 124M public photos, and served 3M search requests per day.
- Architected and implemented a scalable dynamic ad serving application for the website to allow sales to target specific portions of the website as well as types of users on a per request basis, resulting in the application serving over 100M dynamic ad requests per day.
- Designed and built flexible Data Access and Caching layer that vastly improved efficiency in serving dynamic pages. Applications were able to attain a very high cache hit ratios on most objects and vastly reduce the number of open database connections as well as overall load on the databases.
Senior Software Engineer – CMP Media
March 2000 – September 2003
CMP is a publishing company that produced a large number of technical magazines and websites, such as Dr.Dobb’s Journal, Byte, Sysadmin, EETimes, and The Perl Journal. My responsibilities included software development, systems administration, security analysis, and systems design.
- Integrated magazine website login systems with legacy subscription systems.
- Created Personalization system that allowed targeted ads, messages, and emails based on user demographics. This substantially increased the value of our online advertising.
- Worked with magazine publishers to design and implement a content management system for CMP’s web publications.
Research Associate, Pharmacology Department – University of Michigan Hospital
July 1998 – February 2000
My responsibilities included performing cytotoxicity assays to understand the mechanism of anti-tumor drugs using human cell cultures as well as conducting HPLC analyses of cell samples.
Education: University of Michigan
BS, Biochemistry
- Received the Sokol academic scholarship for excellence in chemistry.
- Enrolled in University of Michigan Honors College.