# Ben McAdams Senior engineer at Zapier, building agents. ## About Full-stack engineer with 10+ years across product growth, developer experience, and platform infrastructure. Right now I'm Zapier's Tech DRI for Agent Discovery, spending most of my time figuring out how AI agents find, understand, and act on the web — MCP, llms.txt, JSON-LD, A2A. I like working across the whole stack: TypeScript and Next.js on top, Go, Node.js, and Kubernetes underneath. ## Experience ### Senior Software Engineer, Product Growth — Zapier 2024-11 → present Driving growth through product engineering, developer experience, and AI discoverability. Focused on increasing Zapier's visibility to both humans and AI agents across the web. Tech DRI on cross-functional initiatives spanning experimentation, platform architecture, SEO, and agentic discovery. - Tech DRI for Agent Discovery — set technical direction across schema markup, .md mirrors, llms.txt, and agent-facing skills on zapier.com's highest-traffic surfaces. - Driving measurable impact on agent readiness — zapier.com's visibility to AI agents and answer engines has grown dramatically, week over week, since rolling out schema markup, markdown mirrors, and llms.txt. - Built and manage memberhome, Zapier's Fastify GraphQL BFF, from the ground up — scaling it to meet surging traffic demand from both human visitors and the AI agents increasingly crawling and querying zapier.com. - Built Zapier's open source presence — created zapier.com/opensource and the processes behind it, shipping Claude and Codex plugin manifests, llms.txt, and agent skills across zapier/sdk, zapier/zapier-mcp, and zapier/marketplace. ### Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience — GoFundMe 2023-03 → 2024-10 Full stack engineer on the developer experience team. - Introduced Kubernetes at Classy (acquired by GoFundMe) — stood up the first production clusters on AWS, deployed internal services via ArgoCD (GitOps), and established the container-first default for new services. - Rolled out Backstage (open source IDP) as the internal developer portal — integrating service catalog, tech docs, and health signals into daily engineering workflow. ### Software Engineer II, Full Stack — Twitter 2022-07 → 2023-05 - Twitter 2.0 — lead engineer on Twitter Finance and Twitter Hashflags. Both shipped as advertisement products across iOS, Android, and web, generating revenue at launch. - Cashtag Search — built the search-surface ad module for Twitter Finance: searching a cashtag like $TSLA triggered a live ticker-price ad inline with search results. - Twitter 1.0 — delivered features and optimizations to the advertisement technology stack; worked directly with the largest advertisers to translate requirements into backend decisions. ### Software Engineer II, Backend — Twitter 2019-06 → 2022-07 Mobile developer productivity and CI/CD at Twitter scale. - Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines used daily by 400+ iOS and Android engineers across Twitter's mobile monorepos. - Cut iOS CI build times from ~60 minutes to ~15 minutes — 4x faster feedback for every mobile engineer, every commit. - Led migration of macOS developer productivity infrastructure and CI workloads from on-premise data centers to the cloud, unlocking elastic capacity and cutting queue times. - Built cross-language tooling (Scala, Go, Python) across cloud platform services to raise mobile engineering velocity. ### Software Engineer, Full Stack — SAP 2018-09 → 2019-05 Built services in Go, React, and CockroachDB — deployed across AWS, GCP, and Azure — enabling SAP employees to migrate existing workloads and day-to-day tasks to the cloud. ### Software Engineer, Frontend — SAP 2015-10 → 2018-08 Designed and built transforms within SAP's cloud-based ETL tool Flowgraph using Node.js and HANA DB. Drove team test automation by standing up a scalable regression test suite. ### Software Development Intern — SAP 2013-08 → 2015-10 ### IT Technician — University of Wisconsin — La Crosse 2012-08 → 2013-07 General IT help-desk support. Troubleshot and repaired student and faculty computers. Imaged and re-imaged campus desktops. ## Education ### University of Wisconsin — La Crosse Bachelor's Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science 2011 → 2015 ## Skills - **Agent & AI Discovery** — Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), AAuth (Agent Auth), llms.txt, Agent Discovery, AI SEO / GEO, Structured Data (JSON-LD), Schema.org, Claude Agent SDK, Codex Plugins, Agent Skills, Tool-Use - **Product & Growth Engineering** — Experimentation, A/B Testing, Feature Flags, Split.io / Harness, Eppo, Tech DRI, Cross-Functional Technical Leadership, SEO / GEO - **Developer Experience** — Internal Developer Platforms, Backstage, SDK & CLI Design, Developer Onboarding, CI/CD, Developer Tooling - **Platform Engineering** — Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitOps, Cloud Infrastructure, Build Systems, Mobile CI at Scale - **Languages & Frameworks** — TypeScript, Go, Node.js, React, Next.js, GraphQL, Fastify, Python - **Cloud** — AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure ## Languages - English (Native) ## Elsewhere - [GitHub](https://github.com/BenMcGit) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmcgit/)