Logan McDonald
Principal Software Engineer at Federal Student Aid an Office of the U.S. Department of Education
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLogan McDonald is a Principal Software Engineer in Portland with 11 years of experience building cloud infrastructure, platform services, and resilient digital products across startups and federal agencies. He blends hands-on engineering (SRE, platform, and backend work) with product-minded leadership, having led migrations, identity projects, and observability efforts at BuzzFeed and Kickstarter. Over the last several years he shifted into public service at 18F and Federal Student Aid, helping scale engineering practices, preserve institutional knowledge, and deliver human-centered government services. Comfortable operating between software, product, and organizational change, he excels at turning complex, bureaucratic challenges into simple, lasting solutions. He has a pattern of shipping pragmatic automation—rotatable secrets, CI/CD workflows, and secure platform APIs—and mentoring teams through incident response and runbook-driven ops. His background in economics and international study rounds out a systems-thinking approach to technical and policy-adjacent problems.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Economics Minors: Philosophy Literature International Development, Bachelor's Degree Economics Minors: Philosophy Literature International Development at Seattle UniversityYoruba African History, Yoruba African History at University of Ibadan
Github Skills (121)
authentication10
terminology10
security10
automation10
infrastructure10
tac10
bright10
scale10
recurly10
cookbook10
registrar10
single-sign-on10
policies10
active10
aes10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
loganmeetsworld/lights_on_wa
Feb 2016 - Jul 2016
Contributions:175 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
loganmeetsworld/ScrabbleSinatra
Nov 2015 - Mar 2020
Contributions:2 PRs, 4 pushes in 4 years 5 months
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