Evan M. McLain

“Evan's biggest strength is his ability to reach [out] to his customers and solicit opinion. Too many engineers develop what they think their customers need. Evan actually understands his customer's need before building his solutions.”

“[Evan] often [has] just the right question to ask that unlocks the discussion to move forward.”

“[Evan] provides meaningful, well-considered feedback, and does an excellent job communicating it in a way to guide less experienced engineers to use better practices.”

Experience

Principal Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineering, Tableau [Salesforce] (2013–⁠23)

• New product development: Led front-end development for a mobile-first metrics and KPI tracking experience; key member of the founding team who took the product all the way from concept, prototyping, and design to implementation. Collaborated with product management and UX designers to shape the product, prioritizing data freshness and a fast, lightweight experience that could be consulted and understood in seconds.
• User experience (UX) fulfillment: First scrum lead of the cross-functional team entrusted with the consistency and learnability of the overall Tableau user experience. Relentless attention to detail on “smooth tooltips” feature inspired customers to say it was “a game changer” and they were “in awe of how customizable, fast, and insightful our tooltips are.” Led planning and work decomposition of the web portion of a complete UI overhaul; successfully completed while maintaining the integrity of previously-published visualizations.
• Agile leadership: Drove Kanban backlog for a multi-year project to migrate 1.5M lines of browser front-end code out of a monolith to an independent build. Collected meticulous data and visualized our steady progress, giving the organization confidence. Finally, launched a concentrated 2-month effort to finalize the migration that finished a week ahead of schedule.
• Developer experience (DX) rigor: Seamlessly moved 140 engineers to the new independent Git-based build platform in a no-drama migration. An architect commented, “I kept looking for the Slack channel full of people with their hair on fire, but there wasn’t one.” Netted 6x improvement in code-review-to-checkin time and 10x in build reliability.
• Mentorship: Cited as an “excellent mentor” of other developers who provides “honest, respectful, influential feedback” with career advice, design and code reviews.
• Continuous improvement: Measured and improved reliability of front-end unit test suite: previously the #1 problem in Tableau’s monolith, causing a build-blocking failure every week, it now accounts for zero such failures over the last 3 years.
• Customer focus: Advised and supported developers across the organization. Coached customers to help adopt modern tools and practices while also maintaining legacy systems. Drove constant incremental improvements to stumbling blocks as well as long-range plans.
• Clear speaking and writing: Originated many explanatory talks including the highly-rated data ethics session “How to Lie with Statistics” delivered to nearly 1000 Tableau Conference attendees. Prolific writer and editor of internal documentation.

Senior Software Engineer (SDE III), Amazon.com (2003–⁠12)

• Scaling new products: Led the maturation and company-wide adoption of Amazon's internal software configuration management system, Apollo. Former Director Jon Jenkins called it “probably one of the most important pieces of ‘special sauce’ that we have.” Enabled 100x scaling of Amazon.com internal systems in 4 years, fueling the radical decentralization that is key to Amazon's technology strategy.
• Resilient design: Developed Apollo user interface and core data model to enable software to be safely deployed, updated, and rolled back by people of varying skill levels on a substrate of unreliable and constantly changing hardware.
• Developer acceleration: Sped up “dev loop” experience by unifying siloed internal tools, allowing developers to build, test, release and deploy faster with lower cognitive load.
• Streamlining workflows: Led usability, availability, and security rearchitecture of a Ruby on Rails system that managed the issuance and distribution of 15K internal SSL certificates and private keys. Collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) teams to integrate with internal tools for simplified deployment and automatic credential rotation.

Senior Software Engineer, Consystant Design Technologies (2001–⁠03)

• Exploring new paradigms: Led user interface team for a component-based development tool for network processors. Designed, prototyped, and implemented interface features in close collaboration with back-end team.
• Customer insight: Volunteered for support and sales responsibilities and learned Intel network processor assembly language in order to understand customer requirements.

Captain, United States Air Force (1995–⁠2000)

• Operationalizing change: Responsible for certifying upgrades to a multi-million-dollar rapidly deployable communications platform integrating TCP/IP networks, radio and satellite communication systems, serial data links, and voice while maintaining separation of classified data streams.

Other

• Designed and implemented a Windows application for graphical waveform creation on Hewlett-Packard (now Keysight) electrical test equipment
• Conducted research and experiments to develop mathematical models for optical illusions in color and luminance. Implemented image processing software to correct for these effects.

Education

• M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
• B.S. with Honors in Computer Science, summa cum laude, University of Michigan
• Elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies