Mackenzie Starr is a Staff Software Engineer in New York with 12 years of experience building robust, performance-minded systems and simplifying complex code. At Etsy they progressed from engineer to staff, shaping scalable backend services and driving engineering quality across the org. Mackenzie pairs practical production work with deep performance tuning—contributing core functionality to phpspy, a low-overhead PHP sampler, including constant-time tracing and libdwfl symbol resolution. Comfortable across full-stack and infrastructure concerns, they have a history of migrating legacy platforms to cloud, shipping test-driven features, and improving developer ergonomics. Trained in Music Technology and Web Application Development at NYU, Mackenzie brings a creative, systems-oriented approach to making software feel effortless.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Music Technology and Web Application Development, Bachelor’s Degree Music Technology and Web Application Development at New York University
Contributions:23 commits, 9 PRs, 23 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Mackenzie significantly contributed to the `phpspy` project, a PHP profiling tool. They implemented core functionality, including making the trace poll run in constant time, adding the option to specify the sample rate, and adding the ability to print zvals. Further work focused on improving performance by implementing a time-based sleep mechanism and integrating with libdwfl for symbol address resolution, as well as addressing dependencies and build processes.
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