David O’Dowd joined MongoDB in January 2022 as a Technical Program Manager, bringing over 20 years of software delivery experience. At MongoDB, he has experienced significant growth partnering with product and engineering executives to successfully deliver key initiatives across the MongoDB Atlas Engineering portfolio such as the DevOps Tools program and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) program. His efforts in establishing the long-term backend engineering vision for Atlas, mentoring team members, building new engineering teams, process improvement, Jira/Slack automation and managing cross-functional programs have propelled his career forward.
David is passionate about fostering collaboration, driving process improvement, delivering impact, and sparking innovation, all to empower customers worldwide to build more efficiently through our Atlas Admin API and all our programmatic methods. Read on to learn more about the tools and programs led by David and his team.
My path as a Technical Program Manager at MongoDB is a story of continuous learning, strategic innovation, and collaborative problem-solving. When I joined the API Experience and Kubernetes teams, partnering with our VP of Engineering for these areas, I discovered a unique ecosystem at the critical intersection of technology and customer experience, which was experiencing rapid growth. This growth would double the number of engineering teams and create multiple new Director of Engineering and Product Manager roles. These new teams were a continuing sign of our commitment to our customers who are developers accessing the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform programmatically, leveraging various DevOps Tools such as:
Engineering programs with high-scale impact
The DevOps Tools program is more than an engineering initiative—we’re digital bridge builders. Its mission extends beyond writing code; we create seamless connections between MongoDB’s products and our customers’ diverse DevOps and Infrastructure as Code landscapes. We operate where technology meets human experience, ensuring our APIs are not just functional, but intuitive and transformative. We consistently analyze the market to meet our customers’ programmatic interaction needs with Atlas. Additionally, we focus on documenting our products to enhance the developer experience.
As a Technical Program Manager, I’ve focused on embedding DevOps Tools considerations deeper into the software development lifecycle across teams building the Atlas Control Pane. I’ve introduced innovative approaches like:
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Automation to alert API Experience teams earlier in the product planning process to allow for cross-functional discussions around versioning, breaking changes, DevOps tools requested by customers along with API first or API only techniques
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AI to identify dependencies in Product Descriptions and Scopes automatically
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Cross-team contracts to standardize collaboration between teams
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Creation of new teams to tackle new product areas like our Atlas Terraform Operator and Atlas Kubernetes Operator
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Jira Dashboards using the Jira API/Scriptrunner for executive metrics on team delivery and inter-team dependency management
Increasing security, durability, availability, and performance through SOA
Beyond the DevOps Tools Program, I’ve worked on the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) program, driving MongoDB’s long-term backend vision for our cloud backend platform. I focused on aligning over 150 projects between 30+ engineering teams towards the SOA macroservices vision. This effort aims to enhance feature delivery pace while improving customer-visible reliability. Partnering with the VP of Engineering, I have helped shape an architecture supporting sustainable scaling through the breakout of our monolith into macroservices to allow us to scale our workforce and Atlas customer base.
The human side of technology
What makes our work truly exciting is not just the technical complexity, but the human connections we create. By designing more intuitive APIs and integration tools, we’re helping developers worldwide build more efficiently and creatively via programmatic methods.
Whether it’s organizing cross-functional team offsites in Dublin and Barcelona, or creating sophisticated Jira and Slack automations, my focus has always been on breaking down barriers between teams, departments, and organisations to deliver smoother collaborative processes for all.
Why this matters
In an era of rapid technological change, especially with AI transforming software development, our work in API Experience and DevOps Tools is more than ever at the forefront of enabling customers to programmatically access our products, such as Atlas Vector Search, to leverage the full potential of their data for AI-driven use cases.
My journey at MongoDB has been about empowering teams, connecting technologies, connecting people, and helping our customers achieve more than they thought possible through our developer data platform.
If you’re passionate about bridging technology and customer experience, there’s no more exciting place to be than MongoDB’s API Experience and Kubernetes teams.
Head to our careers site to apply for a role on David’s team and join our talent community to stay in the loop on all things #LifeAtMongoDB!
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