# David Tolley > Automation Frameworks | Test Automation | Developer Experience | Internal Tools Tech Lead & Mentor Location: Draper, Utah, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/davidtolley I do what needs to be done in order for developers to function more efficiently while also increasing the quality of their code. I remove technical roadblocks so that every commit is a potential release candidate. I am an experienced Tech Lead in Quality Automation and Developer Experience with a history of creating automation frameworks that drastically reduce required resources. I create tools which allow companies to report defects more easily, test more quickly, and release more often. Specialties: Continuous Integration - CI Continuous Delivery - CD Test Automation Frameworks Internal Tools System Testing Performance Testing ## Work Experience ### Senior Staff Software Engineer - Automation Frameworks and Tools @ Medallia Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area - I led the overall testing philosophy and automation frameworks and tools design across all of Medallia. - This was a hybrid Quality Engineering Manager, Product Manager, Coach and IC role. - Led the migration of Medallia's CI system from Jenkins to GitHub actions. This saved the company almost $10,000 per month in CI resource costs, while more tightly integrating test results with PRs - Led a team which specialized in the integration of quality and build processes from acquisitions - Mentored and coached over 70 engineers in the Quality Org, who were distributed across the world - Created a System Test framework to ensure we met our communicated performance and uptime guarantees. - System Test ultimately resulted in a 48% reduction of customer-reported issues after being implemented. - Led the migration of the main C++ project from LLVM 7.1.0 to LLVM 14.0.0, allowing advance code coverage features such as branch tracing to exist - Led the migration of Production, test environment, and developer VMs from Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS to Ubuntu 22.10, including defining the systems in code using Terraform. - Migrated the PHP System Test framework from php 4.4.9 to 8.0.23 - Led the migration of an acquisition from Python 2.7.15 to Python 3.10.7, including the migration of their Jenkins CI system to our standard GitHub Action workflow. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Medallia Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area - Created a synthetic dataset which allowed Engineers to develop against a safe environment - Created tools which allowed Engineers to easily add data and configurations to existing test datasets even when APIs were not available - Created and consolidated the UI Testing framework based on Playwright and TypeScript, now used company wide - Lead the initiative to make it mandatory that each defect patch included an automated test to prevent a duplicate defect in the future - Lead a team in creating a tool which converts manual test steps into dynamic automated UI tests - Lead a team to create a consolidated API Contract Testing framework to reduce the number of defects caused by refactoring the underlying API implementation - Created a Service Catalog utilizing Backstage.io - Led and created the use of Python, Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes in a transition from bare-metal to AWS ### Senior Software Engineer @ GitHub Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | United States ### LMTS - Pardot @ Salesforce Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area - Technical lead for the QE organization of Pardot; Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation service. - Created an advanced test framework that is used for everything from functional UI testing to visual regression and production release verification. - Created a test data REST API decoupled from the core application which gives external testing frameworks the ability to create, read, update and delete resources on the fly as needed. - Created a PHP tool, which allows remote tests running against a given application to generate code coverage results based upon a cookie present on requests. - Created a fully containerized WebDriver Grid environment inside of Docker to drastically reduce the runtime of our UI test suite, while removing infrastructure defects and costs associated with our previous cloud test infrastructure provider. ### SMTS - Productivity @ Salesforce Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 - Refactored the UI test suite on our Core service, which handles billions of transactions a day for customers around the world. - Reduced infrastructure errors by assisting Operations team migrating from a static build infrastructure into an elastic distributed system based on OpenStack. - Worked with developers to migrate tests to a new and faster framework. - Updated and enhanced static analysis tools to provide quicker and more pertinent feedback early in the CI cycle. ### Owner @ Syth Consulting Jan 2010 – Jan 2015 | Seattle, WA Syth Consulting is a small Continuous Integration/Delivery consulting firm helping companies scale there CI/CD systems. I work with companies from the ground up: developer workflow, branching strategies, build scripts, test automation, CI system design and release automation. I utilize free and open-source technologies such as JUnit, Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, SVN, Git, Apache Mesos and Docker to develop cutting-edge and highly-scalable self-service build pipelines that give meaningful, actionable feedback. ### Release Architect @ Groupon Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Palo Alto, CA Transforming the way our CI system is presented and ran, in order to provide better information which is easier to access. Reducing end-to-end run-time while increasing build stability to produce more confidence in test results. Automated the SOX approval process to eliminate as many manual steps as possible. Created a one-stop-shop for build automation, release requests, SOX approval, help requests and release automation. Pretty much doing whatever it takes to get code to production faster, easier, and with less human errors. ### Sr. Quality Assurance Automation Engineer @ AtTask, Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 ### Quality Assurance Engineer @ Revinetix, Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 ## Education ### Utah State University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dtolley --- Source: https://flows.cv/davidtolley JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/davidtolley/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22