Ian Mackay
AI Evaluation Engineer
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Mackay is an AI evaluation engineer and backend/infrastructure specialist with eight years of software experience, currently focused on evaluating and improving code generation across frontier LLMs and building benchmarks and training data for agentic systems. He brings cloud-native production experience from AWS where he shipped RDS Custom for Oracle features, led a cross-team scaling project, and engineered automation that cut build times dramatically and saved over $1.4M in developer costs. Ian’s background spans full-stack contributions to well-known open-source projects (notably improving Linux shell integrations for GitHub Desktop) and hands-on backend optimizations in Laravel and mobile app pipelines. He combines systems-level thinking with practical tooling and mentorship, and has a scientific grounding from a dual chemistry and computer science BS that informs his analytical approach to model failure analysis.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Chemistry and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Chemistry and Computer Science at Thompson Rivers University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
sh10
git10
typescript10
linux10
script10
javascript10
terminal-emulator10
typescripts10
shell10
linux-shell10
github10
electron10
scripting10
typescript-types10
cicd4
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
shiftkey/desktop
May 2019 - Jul 2019
Fork of GitHub Desktop to support various Linux distributions
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 2 PRs, 33 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on enhancing the shell support within the Linux environment for the GitHub Desktop fork. Their contributions involved adding support for various terminal emulators, including Urxvt, Konsole, Xterm, Deepin Terminal, and Terminology. The user also addressed and corrected spelling errors and made adjustments to improve the functionality of these shell integrations, including command adjustments.
distributionslinuxdesktopgithub-desktoplinux-distributions
desktop/desktop
Nov 2017 - Jul 2019
Focus on what matters instead of fighting with Git.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 1 PR, 10 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on enhancing the application's shell integration, particularly for Linux systems. Their contributions involved adding support for various terminal emulators such as Urxvt, Konsole, Xterm, Deepin and Terminology. These changes included modifying the codebase to correctly parse and launch applications within the supported terminal emulators. Minor code changes such as spelling fixes and beautifying were also noted.
fightingelectronmattersgithub-desktoptypescript
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