Iain Mcdonald
Director Of Engineering at Smartsheet
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIain Mcdonald is a seasoned engineering leader with two decades of experience building scalable software and growing high-performing teams, currently serving as Director of Engineering at Smartsheet. He has repeatedly scaled organisations—from Skyscanner to Smartsheet—architecting platforms that handle real-time collaboration at 30K events/second and driving product-led revenue initiatives. Iain combines hands-on technical delivery (event streaming, large-scale data migrations, low-latency systems) with people leadership, having expanded engineering headcount from single digits to 70+ while keeping attrition low. He’s also led operational excellence programs that enabled 305 deployments/year at 99.9% availability and delivered multimillion-dollar cost and revenue outcomes. With a PhD in AI and a background spanning trading systems to enterprise workflow automation, he blends rigorous research thinking with pragmatic engineering execution. Outside work he documents and shares his learnings via GitHub (lifebeyondfife), blogging and a tech podcast, signalling a genuine commitment to engineering culture and mentorship.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Artificial Intelligence, PhD Artificial Intelligence at University of St Andrews
German
Github Skills (64)
deterministic10
twitter10
matrix10
mathnet10
solver10
statistics10
dotnet10
interpolation10
differentiation10
app-manager10
regression10
numerics10
fft10
constraint10
constraint-programming10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
lifebeyondfife/Cm93
Jan 2014 - Jul 2017
Contributions:1 release, 259 commits, 106 PRs in 3 years 6 months
gamesfootballchampionshipapp-managerfootball-manager
lifebeyondfife/whisky-menu
Mar 2020 - Oct 2022
Single page web app for viewing whisky menus
Contributions:38 PRs, 50 pushes, 33 branches in 2 years 6 months
single-pagesingle-web-pageweb-pagewhisky
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