Biography: Brian McCalister

Brian McCallister works at Groupon as CTO of Platform. Prior to Groupon, he was Principal Architect and Distinguished Engineer at Ning, where he was responsible for directing and communicating the technical big picture across the organization. At the Apache Software Foundation, Brian has served on the Board of Directors and as PMC Chairs for the DB and ActiveMQ projects. Within the ASF he has focused on pushing for greater project autonomy, and mentoring and shepherding a number of projects into the foundation, including Cassandra, Mesos, and Jclouds.

In his broader past, Brian has worked variously as a programmer, engineering manager, technical writer, and systems administrator on projects ranging from internet platforms to loom control drivers. He is also a great mentor, and takes a vested interest in developing other engineers to help turn them into great engineers. Brian holds an MS in Education and BA in English both from Bucknell University.