Vancouver, BC · Senior engineer & technical lead
I’m BJ McKay, a senior software engineer and technical lead with 13+ years building production software—deep in backend architecture, APIs, performance, and developer tooling.
01 / Selected work
Architecture matters most when it helps a team move through complexity with confidence.
I led a core-domain migration into Rails Engines, from implementation through staged rollout and retirement of the legacy path. Shadow-mode feature flags and deprecation metrics made the transition observable before it became irreversible.
I also built reusable migration commands, generated Datadog dashboards, and added Terraform-managed alerts designed to stay useful under low traffic.
I designed event-driven customer-data synchronization for acquired Rails products, using Azure Event Grid and shared APIs as the source of truth. The work crossed product boundaries, so the architecture had to be adaptable as well as technically sound.
Alongside the integration work, I diagnosed Sidekiq reliability problems, introduced job deduplication and queue priorities, and improved CI workflows.
Across startup consulting projects, I built B2B integrations that had to handle batching, polling, rate limits, and data-warehouse workflows. I turned recurring patterns into reusable API-client and testing tools instead of solving the same class of problem from scratch.
I also led a mobile backend rewrite involving payment and membership state machines, with an OpenAPI contract that gave the mobile team a dependable interface.
02 / How I work
I move between architecture, implementation, and team leadership without treating them as separate jobs.
I’m at my best when the problem is ambiguous, the system has history, and the path forward needs both technical depth and practical judgement. I clarify the shape of the work, build alongside the team, and leave behind better tools and practices.
I use AI and agentic workflows across research, implementation, testing, and documentation—but always with deliberate review and verification. Speed is useful; confidence is the goal.
03 / Career highlights
2025–2026
Engineering Team Lead
Promoted from Senior Software Engineer; hands-on leadership on RL environments for a frontier lab.
2025
Senior Software Engineer
Core-domain migration, observability tooling, and mobile backend services.
2023–2025
Senior FullStack Engineer
Joined on contract, extended, and converted in-house.
2021–2023
Senior Software Engineer
Extended consulting engagement across APIs, platforms, and product delivery.
2019–2020
Lead Software Developer
Enterprise APIs, authentication, quality practices, and mentoring.
Earlier engineering work includes CareGuide, Pack.com, Foodee, and Glacier Media.
04 / Contact