Ian Macleod
Software Engineer at Figma
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Macleod is a seasoned software engineer with 17 years of experience building production-ready systems across startups and large tech companies, currently at Figma after senior leadership roles including Chief Architect and Senior Staff Engineer. He blends full-stack and mobile expertise—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Apollo Client and React Native—while driving backend reliability and developer experience in the Ruby ecosystem through RuboCop and ruby/spec contributions. Known internally as a pragmatic "cat herder," Ian repeatedly surfaces improvements that reduce unnecessary work (e.g., custom equality checks to avoid re-renders) and refactors core components for clarity and performance. He’s equally comfortable shipping device-level fixes for iOS, architecting distributed systems, and authoring tests that keep language-level behavior correct, reflecting a rare mix of deep engineering craft and systems thinking.
16 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Stackoverflow
8,001reputation
2.5mreached
85answers
16questions
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
routes
top-5%
jquery
top-5%
regex
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (62)
rubocop10
spec10
programming-language10
javascript10
ios10
react-native10
mobile-development10
testing10
css10
rubinius10
rspec10
typescript10
document-generation10
virtual-machine10
apple-push-notifications10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
nevir/groc
Nov 2011 - Dec 2014
Documentation generation, in the spirit of literate programming.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:201 commits in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to the development of documentation generation features. Their work included refactoring the project's file processing, implementing support for markdown files, and adding support for multiple programming languages. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the styling and user interface elements, and integrated a table of contents for easier navigation.
literate-programmingspiritpdfliterate
rubocop/rubocop-rspec
Jan 2014 - Jun 2014
Code style checking for RSpec files.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:19 commits, 1 comment in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to the RuboCop RSpec plugin by introducing and modifying existing tests. Their work involved updating the plugin's version and making changes to test files. The user also refactored existing tests, specifically those related to file naming and method specs, to improve coverage and maintainability. Furthermore, the user added new tests that promote the use of `described_class` and other RSpec best practices.
code-stylelintrailstestingruby
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