Danny Yates

Director of Engineering

• Led four backend teams and their engineering managers (roughly 35 people) across the entire platform, handling 10,000 automation steps/sec and 500 third-party integrations.
• Built Tray’s MCP capabilities for AI agents, enabling customers to build their own agent tools in Tray’s low-code builder and expose them via MCP, so that a single tool call can orchestrate multi-step actions with the full power of a Tray workflow. Also delivered an MCP server that allows agents to build and debug Tray workflows directly.
• Designed and delivered Tray's on-prem data access offering, unlocking customers whose data lived in their own datacentres or private clouds, opening up several six-figure ARR (annual recurring revenue) accounts the business could not otherwise have won.
• Cut net costs by close to $1m a year and shortened delivery of new features from months to weeks by replacing an ageing in-house customer-facing analytics system with a vendor solution, consolidating EMR, Airflow, Redshift, OpenSearch and bespoke scripts into a single platform ingesting directly from Kafka in real time.
• Scaled the engineering team through a period of growth, then led it through a subsequent contraction, keeping delivery steady and the remaining team focused throughout.
• Owned team performance and development, coaching engineers to stronger delivery and holding a clear quality bar, including addressing a mis-hire early and fairly during probation.
• Created and chaired a platform-wide architecture review board, replacing siloed team-level decisions that had bred inconsistency and unnecessary complexity. This was deliberately kept lightweight so that it caught real risks without becoming a bottleneck. Identified key issues before implementation, ranging from a team about to adopt an unfamiliar database engine to a change that would have bypassed data-residency compliance.
• Reduced customer-impacting incidents by building deep, low-level observability across the platform to surface leading indicators of failure, from classic resource exhaustion to early signs of degrading customer experience. This shifted the team from reacting to incidents to identifying and solving them before customers were affected.
• Defined the platform's technical strategy, setting out the risks and trade-offs and a framework for prioritising operational stability, technical debt and customer support against new product delivery.

Engineering Manager · redundancy due to COVID cut-backs

• Managed two cross-functional squads (12 engineers, 2 PMs).
• Recovered a delayed localisation project and launched four translated websites (France, Germany, Spain, Italy) on schedule, enabling browsing and buying in customers’ native languages and lifting sales in those markets.
• Integrated 30 new global stores with a cross-border shipping partner, extending the platform's international reach.
• Consolidated a separate blog into the main CMS, giving a consistent design and cutting third-party costs.

Engineering Manager · London engineering closure

• Led two agile teams (14 engineers, QAs, PMs) delivering seller tools.
• Delivered VAT-compliance tooling ahead of new UK legislation that required sellers above a sales threshold to register a VAT number, protecting eBay from direct financial penalties while keeping affected sellers trading. The core system served around 20,000 API requests/sec to surface data on eBay’s most-trafficked page, the “view item” page.
• Owned the architecture roadmap and aligned delivery across geographies; championed promotions, resolved performance challenges, and led recruitment.