@jstjoe
Joseph McCarron
OVERVIEW
I love APIs, agency, and platforms.
Strategic product leader with a proven track record of creating category-defining technical platforms and APIs.
- Built and scaled products at Skyflow (data privacy as an API), Apollo GraphQL (enterprise API schema management), and Zendesk (APIs & platform).
- Self-taught developer and professional product manager with extensive experience in APIs, interfaces, integrations, and distributed system architectures.
- Consistently delivered innovative solutions that drive significant business growth while scaling product and engineering teams across multiple continents.
- Proponent of API-first development, platform thinking, agile development, product-led growth, and hands-on technical product management.
- Passionate about creating exceptional developer experiences.
EXPERIENCE
Product Engineering, Management, Leadership
Head of Product, Core Platform
| Skyflow | Apr 2025 - Present |
Recently promoted to manage the overall platform and drive improvements and deeper integrations across existing and emerging products, as well as drive hands-on engagements with top enterprise customers.
- Hands-on product leader responsible for developer experience across the org including all API schema reviews, SDK code reviews, and development of new developer interfaces.
- Created and manage the SkyflowFoundry open source GitHub organization for sharing examples and solutions with the community.
- Selected and developed updated documentation platform, end-of-lifing legacy internal platform.
- Developed sample apps and demos: sky_cli, Databricks Functions, Databircks AI, Skyflow GraphQL, and more internal examples.
Product Lead
| Skyflow | Jan 2022 - Apr 2025 |
Leading product strategy and execution for Skyflow’s data privacy vault and developer experience platform.
- Built and manage a product team across two continents responsible for encryption, key management, tokenization, schema management, APIs, SDKs, UIs, documentation, and analytics.
- Personally led 5+ scrum teams building the core vault, new APIs, new UI, new SDKs, documentation platform, and core platform capabilities.
- Led platform scaling & performance efforts to achieve 1000x vault scale.
- Led additional efforts including global company-wide hackathon, hands-on implementation of key customers, and critical sales demos to close landmark customers.
Co-Founder and CTO
| TeamTeacher.ai | May 2024 - Present (part-time) |
Solo engineer and CTO building an AI teaching assistant agent for educators, partnering with my sister (a teacher) as CEO.
- Created a self-driven agent for teachers that dramatically enhances teacher productivity, happiness, and classroom effectiveness.
- Developed full-stack reactive TypeScript + SvelteKit application incorporating vector databases, RAG techniques, and a dynamic agentic AI architecture.
- Developed context-management techniques and advanced agentic tools including agent-as-tool orchestration, computer use, and adaptive workflow management.
- Built a fast CLI for turning PDFs into optimized, indexed, markdown-based knowledge bases incorporating novel techniques for reconstructing context (e.g. inlining footnotes, referencing other documents, etc).
- Implemented end-to-end observability and conversation tracing.
- Built a custom eval framework using Google Sheets to test 1000 prompt combinations with a novel LLM-as-judge and re-eval options -> drove 12 iterations to agentic architecture.
- Implemented and tested integrations with tools including: Supabase (& pgvector), LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Pinecone, Qdrant, Google Drive, Tavily Search, AI SDK, and more.
Staff Product Manager
| Apollo GraphQL | Oct 2020 - Jan 2022 |
Led platform product strategy for the Apollo GraphQL Platform including Apollo Studio, Schema Checks, Build Checks, Uplink, Schema Contracts and more.
- Created Apollo Schema Contracts, an enterprise feature enabling organizations to tailor GraphQL schemas for different audiences while maintaining a unified graph.
- Led development of the core SaaS platform including Schema Management, Metrics, Federation, Contracts, the Platform API, Webhooks, and Uplink.
- Developed and executed the product roadmap for the GraphOS platform used at scale at companies including eBay, Expedia, Netflix, Walmart, and Wayfair.
- Drove 3x product-led enterprise growth in one year.
Group Product Manager, APIs & Platform
| Zendesk | Jul 2019 - Jan 2020 |
Led Zendesk’s transformative platform initiative, creating a new category in the CRM space with Sunshine, built natively on AWS.
- Built and hired a product team and seven engineering teams, launching three successful product lines within one year.
- Conceived and launched Zendesk Custom Objects, revolutionizing how businesses store and connect external data sources.
- Led architectural vision sessions with the CEO for strategic customers including Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Disney, and T-Mobile.
- Delivered a platform that unified customer data across systems, creating a complete view of customer interactions.
- Created an open, flexible platform that enabled developers to build custom experiences on Zendesk infrastructure.
- Managed acquisition of Smooch for the Platform team, driving key messaging and API integration initiatives.
Lead Product Manager, Platform
| Zendesk | July 2018 - July 2019 |
Spearheaded the development and launch of Zendesk Sunshine, a modern CRM platform that fundamentally changed Zendesk’s market position.
- Expanded platform team from 6 to 36+ across multiple continents, establishing a cross-continent collaboration model.
- Led the strategic transition from monolithic architecture to a modern distributed platform built on Kubernetes & AWS.
- Developed and launched WhatsApp integration in close partnership with Facebook, improving messaging capabilities and delivering market-leading messaging capabilities (improving Whatsapp’s API strategy along the way).
- Created the foundation for Zendesk’s API-first integrated platform strategy, enabling customers to connect all their customer data and systems to provide context and challenge market leaders.
Senior Product Manager, Platform
| Zendesk | January 2018 - July 2018 |
Drove platform strategy working directly with executive leadership to shape Zendesk’s technical future.
- Conceived, championed, and launched Zendesk Custom Objects, enabling companies to model and store external data.
- Reshaped product launch methodology across the company, improving go-to-market efficiency.
- Led adoption of modern platform technologies including Kubernetes, Cassandra DB, Kafka, and AWS infrastructure.
- Acted as product partner (“Product Architect”) to the Global Architecture team, driving technical consistency across product lines.
Product Manager, APIs
| Zendesk | February 2016 - January 2018 |
Established API product management discipline as Zendesk’s first API-focused PM, creating foundational platform capabilities.
- Managed a central API team and experience across all Zendesk APIs.
- Created and standardized the “API Law,” and managed the API Review process, establishing consistent patterns across all Zendesk product APIs.
- Led cross-team efforts to standardize APIs, significantly improving developer experience and adoption.
- Managed Zendesk’s channel integrations including Facebook, Twitter, and the open Channel Framework.
- Drove API-first development methodology, enabling third-party developers to extend Zendesk’s functionality.
- Introduced API schemas and personally wrote the initial OpenAPI (fka Swagger) API schemas for Zendesk platform APIs.
Product Solutions Manager, Platform
| Zendesk | Feb 2015 - Feb 2016 |
Pioneered technical solutions for enterprise platform customers and created the first paid apps development team.
- Founded and managed the Paid Apps engineering team within CX to monetize custom integrations driving over $300k in additional revenue from existing assets in the first year, and hiring/managing the initial team.
- Served as technical account manager for top platform customers including Uber and Airbnb to manage technical relationships and personally address deep platform scaling challenges.
- New unique role created to incorporate mixed responsibilities from Customer Success, Professional Services, Architecture, Engineering Management, and Product Management - reported directly to the VP of Customer Experience.
- Personally built, managed, and delivered 15+ reusable applications - including 6 of the Top 10 apps - using the Zendesk Apps Framework (ZAF) to solve critical customer problems.
- Led discovery, design, and implementation of highest-value enterprise platform solutions.
Solutions Architect (& Engineer)
| Zendesk | Oct 2013 - Feb 2015 |
Established the Solutions Architecture practice as the first Solutions Architect at Zendesk, creating technical solutions for enterprise customers.
- Served as lead technical resource for customer-facing teams across pre- and post-sales organizations. Created a process for estimation and SoW creation.
- Created custom apps and integrations using various APIs to connect customer systems with Zendesk.
- Developed a library of reusable Zendesk apps using the Zendesk Apps Framework (ZAF) to address key customer challenges and fill gaps in the product.
- Built a repeatable playbook for complex enterprise implementations, significantly improving customer success.
Level 1 Customer Advocate -> Support Engineering Team Lead
| Zendesk | Apr 2012 - Oct 2013 |
- Went from “Hello this is Joe from Zendesk, how can I help?” as employee 227, to creating and leading the Support Engineering team and beyond.
- Specialized in API, webhook, and integration troubleshooting for enterprise customers. Worked with engineering on API improvements and bug fixes as the defacto API PM.
- Developed apps and documented solutions for common platform integration patterns.
- Built and improved testing tools including JWT debuggers, SAML debuggers, mobile app testing tools, and much more - with many still in use today.
- Created technical knowledge base for recurring API and integration challenges.
- Led company-wide new-hire training where every emmployee got to learn and test the extent of our product over two weeks of training.
SKILLS
- Making building fun. I love what we do.
- Crafting a vision, telling a story, and executing.
- Organization, documentation, communication, automation.
- Troubleshooting, debugging, testing, and fixing things.
- Power user of agentic AI tools, champion of the context window.
- [IDE] Cline (OSS VSCode extension)
- [CLI] Claude Code CLI & GitHub Actions
- [UI] Claude Desktop with File System
- ChatGPT Desktop with VSCode plugin
- Codex UI
- [MCP] Browserbase, Sentry, Supabase, Figma, 7Context.
- [LLM] LM Studio
EDUCATION
- Harvard Business School - Data Privacy Certificate Program (2023)
- Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) - Summer Program, Russian Politics & Economics (2010)
- University of Minnesota - BA Political Science & Economics, Minor in Business Management (2012)