Austen Mcdonald
Founder, Author at The Behavioral
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.
11 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
Stackoverflow
76reputation
3kreached
3answers
2questions
Github Skills (47)
universe9
text-based9
legend9
rpg8
php7
nsarray6
game-development6
react6
nsthread6
memory-management6
phpunit6
hhvm6
objective-c6
race-condition6
icon-pack6
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
austenmc/theredbook
Jun 2014 - Dec 2017
Contributions:3 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 3 years 5 months
phd-studentsstanfordphdsurvival
austenmc/.hannibal
Feb 2017 - Feb 2025
Contributions:23 pushes, 5 branches in 8 years 2 months
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