# Will McDonald

> AI Eng @ Eve, ex-Instacart, ex-founder @ Pelagic

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/willmcdonald

Hands-on Software Architect with extensive experience in developing and supporting mission critical applications. Over 20 years’ experience in full-stack web development including DevOps, scalable DB design, data processing, APIs, and modern web applications.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Eve
Jan 2025 – Present
Creating the world's best AI-driven software for plaintiff law firms.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Lightning AI
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025
Making AI development accessible to everyone.

Worked as a full-stack platform engineer, working deeply on all aspects of Lightning's Studios platform – an incredibly easy-to-use web platform enabling users to build and use AI on cloud ML infrastructure within seconds.

Owned features end-to-end, with a focus on clean UI design, user-focused UX, and elegant API.

### Senior (L6) Software Engineer @ Instacart
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022
- Designed and built backend ads-serving services
- Strong focus on reliability and performance
- Launched many new revenue-generating ads products
- Managed Ads ML training and scoring infrastructure
- Scaled software and processes through 30x team growth

### Founder, Chief Architect @ Pelagic Data Systems
Jan 2014 – Jan 2019
I co-founded PDS to give fisheries the answers they need to save the ocean and improve the lives of fishermen, using deep software insights from purpose-built hardware. I was responsible for our software technology stack, from firmware to cloud processing to user applications.

The fishery-analysis platform I created was recognized as industry-leading with numerous awards (National Geographic Marine Protection Prize, Seafood Champion Award for Innovation).

Key accomplishments:
•	Scaled database architecture to enable 500% YOY growth while providing customers complex real-time analysis into their data (PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, Cassandra)
•	Built scalable analysis pipeline that processed billions of records streamed from fishing boats, including parser for proprietary OTA data stream, behavior analysis engine, and alerting & reporting (Ruby, C, AWS, PostgreSQL)
•	Optimized web application for low-bandwidth/connectivity while enabling interactive mapping of 1M+ data points (React, ES6/Javascript, PostGIS)
•	Sped factory hardware testing 10x with automated test suite (Embedded C)

### Senior Web Engineer @ Quri
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014
As #2 engineer, I helped scaled the backend and internal tools of crowdsourced retail analytics platform through 50x customer growth and 10x employee growth.

Created application suite that increased QA, payment, and customer management throughput by 10x, using the then-new React.js. Improved reliability and scalability of application by refactoring monolithic Rails app into microservices and migrating to PaaS. Designed RESTful APIs to support consumer mobile apps

### Web Application Engineer @ Canada/USA Mathcamp
Jan 2011 – Jan 2012
Designed administrative and alumni-facing applications for this educational non-profit teaching mathematically talented high-school students from all over the world.

Wrote new Ruby/Rails applications to allow staff to manage camper data and increase charitable donations. Migrated and normalized 18 years of historical data allowing alumni to network for employment, educational, and social resources.

### Software Engineer @ Airwave
Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 | Sunnyvale, CA
Senior member of an "eXtreme Programming" team designed web applications to manage industrial-scale, heterogeneous Wi-Fi networks. Designed and built automated virtual machine system underlying the company's first SaaS offering. Used virtualization to speed up integration testing by 50% Owned, wrote, and improved developer tools daily as part of a fully-Agile methodology.

Appointed "Chairman and Poobah-for-life of the Committee for Fun". 🎉

### Systems Programmer and Server Specialist @ Epic Systems
Jan 2002 – Jan 2007 | Madison, Wisconsin Area
Developed systems tools and managed internal and customer servers at the #1 medical-software company in the world.

Wrote system-management tools for internal and customer use, including software for medical database administration, VPN/routing, user management, and database security integration. Designed new printing architecture that provided tighter integration with front-end application and improved service availability. Developed a curriculum and taught security certification class for database and systems administrators.


## Education
### BS in Computer Science, Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/will-mcdonald

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Source: https://flows.cv/willmcdonald
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/willmcdonald/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01