Brad Mcmillen is a seasoned engineering executive with 15+ years building resilient, large-scale distributed systems and leading global teams through cloud transformations at Yahoo/Verizon Media. He combines hands-on architecture expertise—spanning event-driven systems, scalable storage, and production AI/ML pipelines—with a track record of delivering 99.99%+ uptime and accelerating product velocity. Brad has grown engineering organizations from ~290 to 500+ engineers, launched mentorship and retention programs, and driven full-stack migrations to GCP and hybrid AWS environments. An Apache Pulsar committer and named inventor on multiple database patents, he contributes directly to open-source messaging infrastructure and has improved broker stability and observability in widely used systems. Trained in engineering leadership at UC Berkeley and grounded in mathematics from Penn State, he pairs rigorous technical judgment with operational excellence and a focus on culture. Notably, he was an early adopter of generative AI and has translated that experience into production-grade pipelines that balance innovation with long-term technical health.
9 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP), Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP) at UC Berkeley College of Engineering
Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics at Penn State University
Apache Pulsar - distributed pub-sub messaging system
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:19 commits, 19 PRs, 3 branches in 2 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily contributed to the Apache Pulsar backend by fixing bugs and improving the stability and performance of the system. They addressed issues related to load balancing, broker monitoring, and resource utilization. The user implemented features like filtering brokers based on build versions and integrating long-term message rate metrics into the broker monitor for better observability. Several commits involved updating internal data structures and configurations for more efficient operation.
Contributions:2 PRs, 32 pushes, 46 branches in 1 month
golangpulsarmessaging-systempub-submessaging
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