Rae Mckelvey
Head Of Product at number 0
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRae Mckelvey is a seasoned product and engineering leader with 14 years building resilient distributed systems that work in disrupted, low-connectivity, and hostile environments. Currently Head of Product at a modular networking startup in San Francisco, Rae focuses on growth and adoption of iroh—a stack for direct device-to-device connections—and has deep hands-on experience with mesh networks, wireless radios, CRDTs, peer-to-peer sync, and edge device replication. Previously they led developer experience and field engineering at Ditto, driving a platform redesign from SQL-style to NoSQL, accelerating integration velocity by 30%, and taking Ditto Query Language adoption from 10% to 90% within a year. Rae’s open-source contributions span important peer-to-peer projects like dat and hyperdrive, improving CLI UX, browser support, and sparse file handling for real-time distributed filesystems. They combine product strategy with applied research (privacy-preserving collaboration at Ink & Switch) and field deployments for vulnerable communities through Mapeo, showing a rare blend of enterprise rollout success and humanitarian impact. Based in San Francisco, Rae pairs technical depth with operational leadership to ship robust, offline-first systems at scale.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Political Science, Computer Science, Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington
Github Skills (39)
editors10
filesystem10
javascript10
query-builder10
back-end-development10
python10
scripting10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
travis-ci10
editor10
cicd10
script10
sql10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
dat-ecosystem/dat
Oct 2014 - Jun 2020
:floppy_disk: peer-to-peer sharing & live syncronization of files via command line
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:372 commits, 166 PRs, 496 pushes in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Rae contributed to the command-line interface (CLI) functionality of the dat project by modifying existing commands and introducing new ones. They refactored code, removing dependencies and moving them to an external module, and added features such as a file selection and messages. The commits show a focus on improving user experience and adding functionality for tasks such as deleting, exporting and importing files.
dat-protocoldiskactive-projectsmore-infosharing
deltachat/deltachat-desktop
Aug 2018 - Apr 2019
Email-based instant messaging for Desktop.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:5 releases, 184 commits, 112 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Rae's contributions primarily focus on setting up and configuring the build and deployment environment. They added Travis CI integration for automated testing and build processes. They also introduced scripts for managing dependencies and configuring the build environment, demonstrating a focus on streamlining the development workflow and ensuring a consistent build process. Additionally, they modified configurations related to testing and build scripts.
federatedsmtpelectronzulipdeltachat-desktop
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