About

I'm Tyler McCraw, a Principal Engineer based in Winston-Salem, NC. I've spent 15+ years building software across enterprise, agency, startup, and AI — and I genuinely enjoy the pressure that comes with shipping things that handle real money for real businesses.

Before Extend, I cut my teeth leading mobile teams in enterprise software. At Prometheus Group, I managed eight mobile developers and led a cross-platform project spanning Android, iOS, and Windows that grew to account for over 60% of the company's revenue. After that, I spent two years at Smashing Boxes, a development agency where I shipped Android apps across a dozen different clients — insurance, sports, healthcare, VR — and introduced CI/CD pipelines and open source libraries that became standard practice.

My story at Extend starts in 2018 when I joined as the sole Android developer at a fintech startup with a big idea: make virtual cards the easiest way for enterprises to manage spend. Over eight years, I grew from building the Android app to owning code across the entire stack — iOS, a Kotlin Spring Boot backend, React frontend, and Terraform infrastructure. I helped ship multi-bank partner integrations serving enterprise customers, worked directly with Google, Visa, and Mastercard to ship virtual card push-to-wallet, guided and scaled the company to support 4+ white-label apps alongside the core Extend app, and drove the technical debt ratio from 22% down to about 5%. The title changed from Senior Android Engineer to Principal Engineer along the way, but the job has always been the same: figure out what needs building and go build it.

More recently, I've been deep in the AI tooling space. I built Gandalf, an autonomous Claude Code orchestrator that manages development workflows across our GitHub org — think code review, feature development, and project coordination, all driven by AI agents. I also built Orca, a web-based task orchestrator with a visual interface for monitoring AI-driven development tasks. These started as side projects to scratch my own itch, and they've become tools I rely on daily.

I also care a lot about giving back to the developer community. I've given talks at local meetups like TriDroid, spoken remotely to groups as far away as Ghana, and guest lectured on mobile development at Wake Forest University. I've been an Hour of Code guest speaker at elementary schools, written articles on getting involved in the Android community, contributed to open source, and organized Extra Life charity gaming events raising over $1,800 for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

Outside of code, I'm a dad, a mountain biker, and a very amateur banjo picker. I drink too much coffee, listen to a lot of metal and emo, and have read the Lord of the Rings more times than I'd admit. Winston-Salem is home and I wouldn't have it any other way.