Mahyar McDonald
Summary
Professional Experience
Founder/CTO
Technical highlights
- Implemented genetic variant processing pipeline handling whole genome sequencing data
- Built real-time chat interface with streaming LLM responses
- Developed iOS survey recommendation app with local data storage and sync
- Achieved five-figure revenue before shutdown due to funding challenges
CTO
Technical highlights
- Debugged and resolved multiple critical stability issues preventing App Store release over several months, which you can see learnings documented here: https://tinyurl.com/makingollie
- Implemented MobileNet-based transfer learning for photo classification
- Built face clustering system using DeepFace and DBSCAN
- Led distributed team of 3 iOS/ML engineers
Manager II
Key achievements
- Improved platform developer NPS from lowest to second-highest company-wide
- Reduced iOS build times significantly through Bazel optimization and caching strategies
- Led cross-team initiatives with endpoint security, CI infrastructure, and IT teams to help build times
- Contributed to next-generation mobile architecture design (Presidio 2)
- Helped redesign promotion criteria for mobile engineers company-wide
iOS Staff Engineer
I focused on improving mobile performance for all of Uber's iOS apps with automatic perf measurement infrastructure and ticketing. I also worked on improving the foundational libraries that all of Uber's apps run on.
The last 6 months as a staff engineer were a transitory period to become a software engineering manager. I started moving my work from staff engineering responsibilities to manager responsibilities as part of a general handoff process. Some of the stuff above in the manager entry was done during this transition time.
iOS Senior Engineer
Major projects
- Reduced app startup time by 50% through offline caching and optimization
- Built unified logging library with backend integration
- Created Python-based AST code patcher ("autopatcher") for automatic performance instrumentation insertion
- Many other things
iOS Engineer
Tango was an app that allowed you to make cross-platform iOS & Android calls over 3G internet. No other app was able to do that in the market. I joined at Series A as their first dedicated iOS engineer and left when they were a 1 billion dollar unicorn after 4 years. I thought it shut down, but I recently found out it transformed into something else years later. I have nothing to do with that stage of the company.
I took over implementing & maintaining new features for the iOS UX part of the app. I created a video voicemail feature and the text chatting feature of the iOS app. Since most of the app was the chat feature and video calls, I focused on improving and expanding the chat feature.
Contract iOS Engineer
Early Career & Internships
Education
University of Victoria
Dec 2010
BSc Computer Science
Victoria, BC, Canada
Skills
iOS Development
Swift, Objective-C, UIKit, SwiftUI, Swift Concurrency, Instruments, CoreML, large-scale app architecture (1M+ lines), performance optimization, memory management
iOS Devtools
Xcode, Bazel / Buck, SourceKit, Swift compiler performance, AST manipulation & code editing with sourcekit, build system optimization, CI/CD pipeline design, monorepo management
Data & ML
Python, MobileNet, Keras, face recognition (DeepFace), clustering algorithms (DBSCAN), transfer learning, on-device ML optimization, analytics dashboards
Bioinformatics
Genomic data processing (VCF/BCF), bcftools, vcftools, samtools, BWA, tabix, DuckDB, variant annotation and analysis pipelines
Backend & Infrastructure
Python tooling, TypeScript, React, Next.js, database design, API integration, LLM integration (OpenRouter)