About
Engineering lead and systems architect. Fifteen years in enterprise software across the US and Germany.
Most of my work has been at the intersection of systems design and implementation: taking an ambiguous problem, designing the interfaces and failure boundaries it needs, and shipping it with a team. The open-source projects on this site are the public version of that working model.
How I work
I'm strongest when I'm setting technical direction for a group and staying in the code while the team drives the implementation. Design documents exist so they can be defended and revised against the code, and in my experience the distance between "design" and "what shipped" is the thing a technical lead has to keep small.
The rest of it is the normal set of engineering-manager responsibilities: holding the bar, rejecting artifacts rather than people, making trade-offs explicit before the calendar forces them, and sharing decision-making with product, stakeholders, and the engineers closest to the code. I've hired, managed, and been managed in environments where those habits were load-bearing, and they are how I expect to work wherever I land next.
Experience
Employer names omitted on the public page; full history and references available on request.
Engineering Manager
- Leading a small senior engineering team on large, complex systems work.
Head of Engineering, Cloud Revenue Assurance
- Managed a team of platform, data, and software engineers building analytical and transactional systems for internal business units.
- Drove revenue assurance for the cloud business through analytics on customer infrastructure across multiple public clouds and on-premises data centers.
- Senior technical partner to executive leadership on risks and dependencies across cross-organizational initiatives.
Principal Solutions Architect
- Lead architect for a financial-planning application managing billions of euros in internal contract value.
- Established distributed development and support teams across legacy and greenfield applications.
- Pushed the scale boundary of a large in-memory columnar database platform using its procedural SQL capabilities.
Senior Solutions Architect
- Designed and implemented distributed systems spanning disparate database technologies, delivering near-real-time performance in multi-continent deployment scenarios.
- Architected on-premises, hybrid, and cloud enterprise solutions and deconstructed legacy monoliths into portable services.
Solutions Architect, In-Memory Database Platform
- Designed and implemented distributed systems with near-real-time performance in multi-continent deployments on a large in-memory columnar database platform.
Earlier career — US Government and Military Enterprise Contractor
Systems work at a US enterprise contractor serving government and military clients. Controlled environments, observability as a day-one requirement, and a bias toward unattended operation are the habits I picked up there and still lean on.
Contact
tomf@tomtomtech.net · github.com/tomtom215 · crates.io/users/tomtom215