Jack MacDonald

S

Senior Engineering Manager at Verge Works | ex-Standard Chartered

Verge Works
Cambridge, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
9+ years experience
Trinity College Dublin
English, Mandarin
Hiring
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Based in Cambridge. I lead developer tools at Verge Works. Mentored 12 engineers through their first promotion. I teach a weekend class on LSP.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Candidates for the role I'm hiring for
  • Working sessions on VS Code extensions
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
Please don't message about
  • Requests to fix your code for free
  • Courses and coaching offers

Prefers short, specific messages

Skills
compilersVS Code extensionsLSPRustTypeScriptCLI design
HiringHiring for a role
closes in 3 months

Looking for a security engineer who has worked on compilers at scale

Role
Security engineer
Level
Mid
Type
Full-time
Work mode
Hybrid
Compensation
$124k-$180k + equity
Team
Developer experience, 5 people
Start
Within two months
Must have
Production experience with VS Code extensions Production experience with Rust Ownership of something end to end
Process
Intro call, technical deep dive, team chat

Comp £86k-£133k. Four conversations, no take-home. Message me with one thing you shipped that you're proud of.

Cambridge, UK · remote OKlspvs code extensionsrust
Open

Experience

  1. Senior Engineering Manager
    Apr 2026 - Present
    Verge Works · 6 mo · Full-time · Cambridge, UK
    • Led the migration of 79 services to CLI design.
    • Moved 91% of developer experience traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 25 minutes to under 6.
  2. Engineering Manager
    May 2024 - Apr 2026
    Standard Chartered · 1 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Cambridge, UK
    • Built the experimentation framework 28 product teams use to ship changes safely.
  3. Software Engineer
    Nov 2021 - May 2024
    GSK · 2 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Cambridge, UK
    • Moved 86% of developer experience traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Reduced cloud spend on developer experience by 45% in two quarters.
  4. Senior Software Engineer
    Apr 2019 - Nov 2021
    HSBC · 2 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Cambridge, UK
    • Led the migration of 56 services to Rust.
    • Built the experimentation framework 34 product teams use to ship changes safely.
  5. Software Engineer
    Jan 2018 - Apr 2019
    Microsoft · 1 yr 3 mo · Full-time · Cambridge, UK
    • Wrote the LSP service that now handles 39 million requests a day.

Projects

Open-source compilers toolkit
2023

A small library for developer tools that 181 developers star on GitHub.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. Trinity College Dublin
    BA, Electronics and Communication
    2012 - 2015

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