Austen Mcdonald
Founder, Author at Reflex Integration Through Play
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAusten Mcdonald is a seasoned software leader, founder, and author with 12 years of industry experience and a PhD in computer science from Stanford. He spent a decade at Meta leading recruiting product teams, chairing hiring committees for mobile pipelines, and personally conducting over 1,000 interviews while coaching 200+ engineers for big-tech success. As Founder of The Behavioral and CTO at Reflex Integration Through Play, he combines hiring expertise with product and technology work that supports service providers for children with special needs. His background spans deep systems research in parallel programming and transactional memory to shipping user-facing mobile products with millions of downloads, giving him rare breadth from hardware-aware research to large-scale consumer apps. Known for mentoring interviewers, defining leveling standards, and rebuilding product experiences from scratch, he brings pragmatic leadership, rigorous technical judgment, and a passion for human-centered hiring.
12 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at Georgia Institute of TechnologyComputer Science, Computer Science at University of West GeorgiaPh.D., Computer Science, Ph.D., Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (32)
text-based10
legend10
universe9
rpg9
php8
algorithms8
algorithm8
survival7
purecss7
coding6
game-development6
uitableview6
system-design6
tableview6
react-native-component6
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
austenmc/.hannibal
Feb 2017 - Jun 2026
Contributions:26 pushes, 5 branches in 9 years 5 months
austenmc/theredbook
Jun 2014 - Dec 2017
A survival guide for CS PhD students at Stanford
Contributions:3 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 3 years 5 months
phd-studentsstanfordphdsurvival
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