Dave McGrath

LUCI Systems

Head of Engineering: Jan 2023 - Present

• Introduced responsible AI use into development workflows, integrating AI tooling, MCP servers, and exploring LLM-driven improvements in productivity and system reliability.
• Supported engineers' professional growth while fostering a culture of autonomy, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
• Refactored production DevOps into a repeatable process, reducing install time from 1 week to 2 hours and scaling installations 3x.
• Paid down long-standing technical debt with documentation and testing, enabling faster delivery of innovative features.
• Established business-aligned KPIs for support tickets, releases, and performance.
• Oversaw full-stack observability implementation: tracing, granular alerting, and monitoring pipelines.
• Hands-on contributions to Elixir, TypeScript (front- and back-end), and C# .NET.
• Managed hosting directly on 60+ customer sites across the country.

Hagerty

Senior Engineering Manager: Sep 2021 - Dec 2022

• Managed the Insurance Billing (C# .NET Desktop) and Money Platform (TypeScript/Nest.js, AWS) teams (~10 engineers), processing millions in daily transactions while dealing with identity verification and fraud detection.
• Partnered with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to align architecture and feature delivery to provide faster, more efficient workflows for product users.
• Strengthened system reliability and reduced downtime through architectural improvements like introducing canary deployments in our AWS payment application.
• Led SOC2 compliance adoption across environments, strengthening controls around data security and risk management.
• Mentored senior engineer to Team Lead promotion.
• C# .NET hosted on in-house hardware, managed Money Platform hosting on AWS.

Beachbody

Engineering Manager: Apr 2019 - Sep 2021

• Scaled the Web Front-End team from 19 ➜ 52 engineers while supporting high-traffic apps (100k+ concurrent users, hundreds of millions in revenue).
• Built and managed the team that implemented an AppSync GraphQL API handling tens of millions of daily requests.
• Introduced scalable React architecture and design patterns.
• Actively contributed to the DE&I Council, promoting inclusion and psychological safety.
• Mentored engineers into leadership roles: authored promotion packages (Lead ➜ Principal Engineer; 4 Senior ➜ Team Leads).
• Managed AWS deployments through Harness.

Swell Investing

Senior Engineer: Jun 2018 - Mar 2019

• Architected and implemented referral feature, onboarding 200k+ new users.
• Practiced Test-Driven Development (TDD) and pair programming to deliver features for the first consumer-facing fractional investment software for green technologies.
• Contributed across Ruby on Rails API, React front-end, and API integrations.
• Hosted on Heroku.

MobileCause

Senior Engineer: Jun 2017 - May 2018

• Delivered full-stack features enabling nonprofits to expand donation capabilities.
• Implemented fraud detection measures to reduce payment fraud and risk.
• Founded a design patterns & algorithms study group to advance skill development across the team.
• Designed and built API integrations with partner companies.
• Reworked payment processing implementation code to support additional providers.
• Utilized Ruby on Rails, TDD, pair programming, and Agile practices.
• Hosted on AWS.

Working with Dave as my manager showed me what a manager can be -- hands-on, supportive, and very enthusiastic about solutioning.

When I joined his team we were all thrown into a big project with tight deadlines. I attribute his deep technical knowledge and 360 support for getting a fresh team up and running to meet the challenge. I honestly thought we were taking on too much, but Dave's strong vision and ability to articulate it is what gave us the confidence we needed to get the project over the finish line.

What made his leadership especially memorable was his interest to talk shop and explore progressive solutions rather than just favoring the path of least resistance. He understand the Developer Experience and has immediately available empathy for the teams he guides. He gets it. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.

Dave is the most hands-on and deeply technically-minded manager I've had the pleasure to work with. He was always present and actively involved in technical brainstorms and architectural discussions, consistently offering highly valuable insight and reviews. All this while managing expectations, roadmapping and organization among all stakeholders.

With Dave's leadership and support, I was enabled to build and maintain a GraphQL replacement for an unreliable REST data API to support our website, resulting in 66% faster loading times while using just 1% of the original PoC's lambda invocations and ended up becoming the main data API across the company, serving tens of millions of requests across multiple customer-facing apps and services. He then built a team around that project, which I ended up leading.

For me, Dave is the golden standard of what I wish to see in an Engineering Manager, and ever since we parted ways I've been looking forward for the day we get to collaborate again.

I had the pleasure of working with Dave at Beachbody, where he was a Senior Engineering Manager and a huge part of my growth as a leader and engineer. Dave always made time for me, even early in his mornings to help me with questions I had, that were both simple and complex relating to engineering and programming in general. And this is why he stands out to me as one of those rare leaders who actually lead by example and always will put themselves out for the benefit of their team.

I got to see firsthand the level of care and high standards Dave put into every project he worked on. He’s someone I’m lucky to call both a colleague and a friend, and I couldn’t recommend him more to any team that values both skill and genuine leadership.

Discuss

Discuss is a simple forum application that I built to learn more about Ruby on Rails and React. It's a simple forum application that allows users to create topics and posts, and reply to posts. It's a work in progress, but it's a fun project that I'm using to learn more about the technologies I'm using. I run it in a docker container on a raspberry pi that sits behind my desk.

Discuss
Source code private but happy to discuss, reach out!

Why I'm Not Coding Tonight

Why I'm Not Coding Tonight is an Eleventy Blog to normalize not coding every night inspired by this tweet from Kelly Vaughn. I run it on Github pages.

Why I'm Not Coding Tonight
Source code

Burn Baby Burn

Burn Baby Burn is a cool open source project I found on GitHub to track the expense of a meeting based on its duration and the number of people involved. I started using it and it was good, but there were some features that I wanted (like adding and removing people after a meeting has already started, resetting, and keeping a history), and as I looked through the code I realized I would need to refactor the codebase to get those features implemented, so I forked and did that and opened up a (non-merged) pull request against the original with my changes. I run it on GitHub pages.

Burn Baby Burn
Source code

Newsletter Signup

At a previous employer we were evaluating whether to use Netlify to deploy one of our applications (conclusion: Netlify is an amazing tool built by a great company and you should totally use them, but in a larger org you have to balance the cost against the number of teams that would take advantage of it and that particular employer opted not to move forward with them). In order to do the evaluation I built a small newsletter signup application utilizing Next.js with Netlify functions (essentially like AWS serverless functions) and a FaunaDB database as a service backend. Neat project, lots of fun to build, everyone got a chuckle. The company was car-focused and most of what they were dealing with was the very top-end, show winner beautiful masterpieces, so I took the opposite approach. The newsletter never existed, so no point in signing up, just a proof-of-concept.

Haggard
Source code