Mike McGarr

Mike McGarr is an engineering leader and manager, who’s been building software and leading teams since 2001. He is passionate about growing engineering teams, especially those focused on developing core infrastructure components essential to the operation of the engineering teams. His area of research and curiosity centers on how organizational culture is developed, cultivated and shaped and devour as much as I can on this subject. His technical background is strongly routed in Java, as well as the growing space of developer productivity.

McGarr is currently a Senior Engineering Manager at Slack, leading the Frontend Infrastructure team. This team is focused on building JavaScript browser components, performance improvements and build infrastructure. McGarr joined Slack in the fall of 2018.

Prior to joining Slack, McGarr was the Engineering Manager for the Netflix Developer Productivity team. He joined Netflix in 2014, moving his family across the country to California. The Developer Productivity space evolved from the then Build Tools team, and McGarr grew the team from 7 engineers to 20. During this period, his team helped build engineering focused tools that enabled underserved engineering communities at Netflix, such as JavaScript, Python and Ruby engineers. His team also built services to help inspect and remediate issues with dependency management.

Prior to Netflix, McGarr was the Director of DevOps, for Blackboard Learn (their flagship product). As Director of DevOps, he was responsible for the build and test infrastructure, as well as the development tooling. In addition to managing the DevOps team, McGarr was charged with coaching senior management, engineering and QA on how to migrate Blackboard Learn towards continuous delivery.

McGarr began his career in the Washington, D.C. metro area as a software engineer consulting for the federal government. He started out at Booz Allen Hamilton where he cut my teeth building software solutions for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command and the National Science Foundation. His passion to build automation, continuous integration and test automation was cultivated here. In 2009 he joined Excella Consulting, where he was immersed in the world of Agile software development. At Excella, he began to My Continuous Delivery journey, automating deployment pipelines for customers.