Mike O’Connor

Inclusive technical leader with decades of experience building engineering teams and boosting software development productivity. As a developer and leader, maintained a proven track record of kindness, consistency, and delivering results.

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager: SWE Data Cloud @ Apple. Cupertino, CA. 2022–Present

Joined a fledgling data analytics team with the goal of removing silos and democratizing data

• Applied software development skills and helped build an analytics platform integrating Snowflake with SWE’s internal systems.
• Onboarded 14TB of data across 650 distinct sources and provisioned 200 accounts on the platform in 2024.
• Provided analytics from aggregated internal data sources to inform business decisions related to Swift Assist and predictive code completion features in Xcode.

Senior Engineering Manager: Software Delivery @ Apple. Cupertino, CA. 2016–2022

After doing something that turned out pretty good, moved on to do something else wonderful

• Joined the department responsible for building Apple’s Operating Systems.
• Took ownership of maintaining and modernizing a sprawling ecosystem of tools dating back to Apple’s acquisition of NeXT.
• Guided the team through a multi-year transition from developing Perl CGI applications deployed on static VMs to Golang micro-services deployed on Kubernetes.
• Improved productivity on a global scale by migrating Apple’s build artifacts from Isilon NFS servers located in Cupertino to a service built on top of Akamai and S3-like blob store.

Engineering Manager: Core OS @ Apple. 2011–2016

Began leadership journey at an iconic software powerhouse

• Promoted to a management role within 7 months of joining the company as an engineer.
• Pioneered the use of a centralized build and test system for code qualification at Apple.
• Hired a team to develop said system and meet the diverse needs of 500 engineers developing low level OS components for all of Apple’s platforms — that system is still in production today and critical to the workflow of 1000s of engineers.

Software Engineer: Transitive (acquired by IBM in 2008), Manchester, UK. 2004–2011

Joined a start-up and got my first taste of building tools and shipping software

• Worked on a team that ultimately delivered software on all Intel Macs released between 2006–2011 and every IBM System p server.

Education

University of Newcastle upon Tyne 2004

• BSc (Hons) Computing Science: First Class