Karrick Mcdermott
VP Platform Engineering
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKarrick Mcdermott is a seasoned platform and site reliability engineering leader with 16 years of experience building high-performance, scalable systems, currently serving as VP Platform Engineering at D. E. Shaw in New York. He combines deep hands-on systems and back-end engineering—contributing to notable Go projects like golang/dep and linkedin/goavro—with strategic leadership of SRE and platform teams at large organizations. His background spans enterprise UNIX development, multi-language toolchains, and production reliability practices honed at LinkedIn and in defense contracting. A former US Navy Lieutenant Commander with nuclear propulsion training, he brings operational rigor and discipline to complex distributed systems and release processes. Collected expertise across open-source dependency and data-encoding tooling underscores a pragmatic focus on correctness, testing, and maintainability at scale.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Dripping Springs High SchoolNavy Nuclear Propulsion, Navy Nuclear Propulsion at Naval Nuclear Power Training CommandCornerstoneEngineering Watch Officer, Engineering Watch Officer at Nuclear Power Training UnitBachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at University of San DiegoChemical Engineering, Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin
Stackoverflow
382reputation
108kreached
12answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
dependency-manager10
avro10
testing10
decode10
decoding10
package-manager-tool10
go10
encoding10
codec10
toolchain10
encode10
package-manager10
data-structure9
filesystem9
algorithm9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
linkedin/goavro
Feb 2015 - Apr 2022
Goavro is a library that encodes and decodes Avro data.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 1 review, 213 commits in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Karrick primarily focused on enhancing the goavro library, specifically concerning record handling. They implemented the ability to specify schemas using both RecordSchema(interface{}) and RecordSchemaJson(string) during record creation. The user's work included modifications to the codec, record, and test files, focusing on features, such as enabling the inclusion of nested records, and default values. Furthermore, they improved the tests to handle complex data structures correctly.
avrogolang
golang/dep
Jul 2017 - Aug 2017
Go dependency management tool experiment (deprecated)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 4 PRs, 89 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Karrick primarily contributed to the `golang/dep` repository, which is a Go dependency management tool. Their work focused on implementing and refactoring core functionalities, as demonstrated by the introduction of `HashFromNode` and `VerifyDepTree` functions. The user also made changes to the internal file system and package tree structures. Further contributions involved test data and related documentation to ensure the proper function of the tool.
golangdependency-managementpackage-managertoolchaindependency-manager
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