# Iris McLeary > Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems/Infrastructure Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/irismcleary I studied EECS at UC Berkeley, worked in educational outreach for a few years, then returned to my first love, engineering. Things I like: Distributed systems problems, designing and enforcing good system interfaces, weird reliability and availability questions, and getting my hands dirty in the deep backend code. I'm also really passionate about inclusion and diversity in engineering. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Baton Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Senior Software Engineer @ Observe, Inc. Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Mateo, California, United States Integrations team - Developed and supported Observe’s data-in integrations, especially the AWS integration and its installation - Planning and troubleshooting of the customer onboarding/integration process with SEs and SAs, including joining customer calls. Helped land major deals by unblocking sales teams. - Validated built-in dashboards and metrics for the GCP integration ### Senior Software Engineer @ Mixpanel Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Maintained and extended the custom distributed database at the core of Mixpanel across the ingestion, storage, and query services - Improved query performance, decreased file sizes, and reduced loading times by adding a new file format to custom database - End-to-end implementation of new services and custom database primitives for Group Analytics - Improved stability, readability, and maintainability of query code by rewriting old legacy backend implementation of Mixpanel’s Signal report Reduced query team oncall burden from 3+ off-hours incidents per week to less than one - Established practices for post-alert RCA - Drove multiple rounds of work removing old alerts and making noisy alerts more reliable and less flappy - War on Incorrect Error Codes: Defined and enforced error interfaces between layers of the query stack and from query stack to the frontend, enabling better retry policies and more accurate alerting - Established dashboard tracking alerts—business hours and off hours—to monitor health and allow early detection of pager/alert burden - Human policy improvements: “two overnight alerts triggers early handoff to a fresh human” Maintained internal C and C++ style guides and coding standards, improving codebase readability by ensuring consistent conventions, naming, and patterns Recognized source of information and excellence - Onboarded employees new to the company or just wanting to dig deeper into the query stack - Mentored employees new to ERG leadership roles - Resource for questions about historical context and deep system expertise Founding lead of Mixability, Mixpanel’s disability ERG, and later co-lead of WeRQ, Mixpanel’s LGBTQIA+ ERG ### Software Engineer @ Mixpanel Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 ### Member of Technical Staff @ Pure Storage Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 Instrumental in efforts to improve reliability, availability, and serviceability as the product matured. - Gained a deep understanding of the system as a whole and the internal and environmental reasons it could fail. - Developed software solutions for fault-tolerance and high-availability of an enterprise storage solution in the face of hardware failures. - Created and led the Hardware Resiliency team (5 members) from its inception in mid-2017. - Worked active customer escalations, diagnosing and developing remediation plans for customer issues. - Worked cross-functionally with lots of different teams both inside and outside engineering (esp. hardware, firmware, embedded, kernel, recruiting, support, escalations, test/CI). - Mentored more junior team members and trained support engineers (both at headquarters and the Dublin, Ireland, support center). Active participant in university recruiting and technical interviewing Very active in women’s and pride ERGs - Selected to represent Pure at GHC the first two years we attended - Started the first Lean In circle at Pure and helped organize several more ### Tutor/Curriculum Developer @ Paul the Tutor's Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Piedmont, CA Tutored middle school and high school students in academic subjects, test prep, and organization, with a specialty in working with students with ADHD. Helped create a learning-disability-friendly ACT Math curriculum. ### Lead Instructor @ Galileo Learning Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Oakland, CA Taught one-week intensive web design courses to rising 5th–8th graders. Topics covered included usability, color models, negative space, layout, and guerrilla marketing. Students worked in pairs to create websites that went live at the end of the week, as well as producing and posting innovative marketing materials. ### Intern Tutor @ Higher Ground Neighborhood Development Corp Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Oakland, CA After-school tutoring and enrichment courses for elementary school students in East Oakland. ### Summer Instructor @ UC Berkeley Upward Bound Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Berkeley, CA Taught Calculus I–III (intro through multivariable) to low-income students from the Oakland and Richmond areas. Responsibilities included mentoring students interested in careers in STEM fields. ### Academic Year Instructor @ UC Berkeley Upward Bound Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Berkeley, CA Taught academic enrichment classes for students enrolled in all levels of calculus, including assisting students with coursework and doing in-depth lessons on difficult concepts in or applications of calculus. ### Academic Year Tutor @ UC Berkeley Upward Bound Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Berkeley, CA Tutored students in math, physics, and other subjects after school. ### Assistant Manager @ Annapurna Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Berkeley, CA Responsibilities included answering customer questions knowledgeably and assisting customers in choosing products that best met their needs, training new employees, and setting up & maintaining the store's computers and wireless network. ### Independent Contractor @ MusicianLink Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | San Jose, CA Fix user-reported bugs and cleaned up/refactored HTML and JavaScript code in the beta release of the JamLink device (see below). ### Production Assistant @ Telegraph Business Improvement District Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Berkeley, CA Assisted in planning and producing a series of street fairs on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Responsibilities included publicizing the events via social media platforms and keeping all event listings updated, editing promotional videos of the fairs and posting them to YouTube, and setting up a high-bandwidth internet connection at the outdoor stage to stream performances on Live365. ### Engineering Intern @ MusicianLink Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 | San Jose, CA Part of the original development team for the JamLink device, which allows musicians to play together remotely via the internet. Responsibilities included: - Researching internet protocols and helping design an ultra-low-latency streaming music system; - Designing and implementing a prototype sound mixing interface in Java using the Eclipse application framework; - Sourcing parts for first-run prototype boards; - Performing schematic review, including comparison to data sheets and reference schematics. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Philips Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Philips had an excellent program for analysis and visualization of chip timing, TimeDoctor, but it was written in C# and only distributed as a Windows executable. Most of the customers were using Unix/Linux in the lab, so I was employed to reimplement the tool in Java. I completely redesigned it to be object oriented, then wrote and tested the new version in Java as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE. It’s available on SourceForge. ### Hardware Engineering Intern @ Aethra Telecommunications Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 Worked as a lab tech in the hardware R&D lab of a small videoconferencing company. My responsibilities included surface-mount and through-hole rework, board testing, and updating schematics for RoHS compliance. ## Education ### Computer Science University of California, Berkeley ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/iris-mcleary-7027a3a0 --- Source: https://flows.cv/irismcleary JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/irismcleary/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01