Mark Mcloughlin
Senior Distinguished Engineer, Inference Engineering & VLLM Committer at Red Hat
Dublin, Dublin 1, Ireland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Mcloughlin is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat with 26 years of experience building and maintaining large-scale open source infrastructure, now focused on inference engineering and a vLLM committer. He has deep roots in cloud and virtualization, rising through technical and leadership roles at Red Hat and representing the company on the OpenStack Foundation board. A prolific contributor across core projects—OpenStack (Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Glance, Heat, Ceilometer), Kubernetes test-infra, OVN-Kubernetes and VLLM—he blends backend systems, DevOps automation, and kernel-level networking expertise. His recent work on vLLM improved observability (Prometheus metrics, histograms) and operational resilience for LLM serving, showing a shift from orchestration to ML inference at scale. Known for pragmatic refactors and dependency hygiene, he often focuses on maintainability and stability rather than flashy features, quietly preventing production incidents across critical projects. Based in Dublin, he also volunteers as a maths tutor, reflecting an ongoing commitment to teaching and mentoring.
26 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BEng Computer Engineering, BEng Computer Engineering at University of Limerick
Github Skills (65)
python10
testing10
bash10
terraform10
refactor10
automation10
mlops10
device-driver10
freeipa10
refactoring10
backend10
linux-kernel10
dockers10
terraformer10
api10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
openstack/glance
Aug 2011 - Jun 2014
OpenStack Image Management (Glance). Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:62 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily contributed to the OpenStack Glance project by modifying core configuration and logging components. Their work included migrating file-based logging to WatchedFileHandler to support log rotation, fixing a typo in a cached images controller, and adding test cases for configuration loading. They also made improvements to the internal configuration and setup of the system. These changes indicate a focus on improving stability and maintainability of the Glance service.
opendevglanceimage-managementopenstack
openstack/nova
Aug 2011 - Jan 2016
OpenStack Compute (Nova). Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:362 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Mark contributed to the OpenStack Compute (Nova) project, focusing on back-end improvements. The contributions included adding a missing module, syncing RPC changes from oslo-incubator, and fixing typos in configuration options. The user also reverted a problematic commit related to kombu heartbeat implementation. Furthermore, they removed unused code and addressed issues related to test setup.
novaopendevopenstackcompute
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.