Director of Software Engineering
Derek T. McKinney
I lead a large engineering team delivering a multi‑million‑dollar platform — and I still design and build production systems by hand.
18+ years across the full stack and the hardware it runs on: front‑end, back‑end, systems architecture, applied AI, and the infrastructure underneath. I build things that are practical, observable, and maintained.
18+
Years across the full stack
4+
Years leading the current team
Director
of Software Engineering
Full-stack
software + hardware
What I do
Engineering leadership, grounded in hands-on building
Engineering leadership
Lead a large team delivering a multi-million-dollar platform — architecture, delivery, hiring, and mentorship.
Systems & architecture
Design end-to-end systems: APIs, data workflows, integrations, and controlled, observable deployment.
Applied AI & LLMs
Build practical AI systems — local LLM stacks, agentic workers, evaluation loops, retrieval, and guardrails.
Full-stack engineering
Comfortable across the whole delivery path, from UI to services to data — still writing and reviewing real code.
Infrastructure & hardware
Self-host and operate Linux, nginx, databases, and GPUs. I built the rig this site’s AI work runs on.
Selected work
Systems I designed, built, and run
Tau Trading System
An automated, AI-assisted trading system I designed and operate end to end — market data, news analysis, agentic decisions, and a monitoring layer with strict staging/live separation.
PythonMCPAgentsObservability
DTM Sales Copilot
A self-hosted AI outreach system built from scratch: a WordPress plugin, a Python worker, and a local LLM, with semantic classification, compliance controls, and a full audit trail.
WordPressPythonLocal LLMCompliance
RigOne — AI compute
A workstation I built for local AI: a headless GPU for compute alongside an integrated GPU for display, running a local LLM stack with no third-party API dependency.
HardwareGPULinuxSelf-hosted
Let’s talk
I’m open to engineering-leadership conversations, technical advisory, and the occasional interesting build.