Experienced engineer with 10+ years in building impactful products and leading engineering efforts. Thomas co-founded a startup that grew to over 1M users and has diverse experience with companies across sizes and industries. He values not just clean, scalable code, but code that provides real value to users.
San Francisco Bay Area
Led and delivered a category-redefining initiative for the company with 3 sub-projects running simultaneously.
Own the core capture features generating terabytes of 4K videos every month.
Work directly with the data science team and own several data charts in Amplitude and Metabase that help assess product health.
Work directly with camera vendors and their engineering teams to ensure seamless camera interactions. Set up the transition of our communication from email to Lark to improve efficiency.
Mentor and distribute knowledge of the capture pipeline to the rest of the team and the company.
Collaborate with customer support on troubleshooting best practices and documentation improving turn-around time for support and decreasing escalation requests.
Involved in development of cutting-edge proprietary AI features.
Support other team members in implementing best practices and delivering simplified code structures.
Continuously monitor for UX issues and collaborate with designers to resolve those issues.
San Francisco Bay Area
React Native, Redux (Toolkit), Typescript, Jest, Kotlin, ObjC, React Native Testing Library
As one of only two engineers responsible for the mobile app that powers the 3D capturing process of an industry-leading reality capture company, I accomplished the following:
Developed a background upload capability using Kotlin and Objective-C, improving user experience by allowing them to continue using the app while large files were being processed.
Resolved technical problems related to predominantly offline usage user behavior and large file processing.
Worked with a heavily event-oriented system that utilizes "redux-observables".
Authored the "@openspacelabs/react-native-zoomable-view" library, which is the only React Native library on the market that allows stable zooming and pinching of images with the correct zoom center.
Maintained and built upon the Jest test suite that primarily uses react-native-testing-library.
Developed additional features, improved legacy code, and gained a deep understanding of the app's architecture by working in all areas of the codebase.
United States
React Native, React Web, MongoDB, XState, Apollo GraphQL, Firebase, Firestore, Jest, Enzyme, Testing Library
Connected via Toptal
Led a team of five engineers (including two QA engineers) distributed across the world, including three Toptal engineers. I interviewed and hired the other two outside of Toptal.
Took over a codebase with high technical debt from an outsourced party and rebuilt the team from the ground up, putting agile practices and lean software development culture in place. Worked with QA engineers to stabilize the product, resolving numerous technical issues and implementing new features.
Rebuilt the infrastructure of the React Native app, cleaning up thousands of lines of repetitive code while establishing a strong foundation for future development. Orchestrated the rest of the team to build new features on top of this infrastructure.
Handled the migration of server-side architecture from Express, Firebase Functions, and Firestore to Apollo, Heroku, and MongoDB Atlas, resulting in better extensibility, security, and simplified logic.
Planned and held regular product meetings to ensure effective collaboration among product, design, and development teams. This facilitated maximum product impact and minimum development effort while promoting high ownership of various product parts among team members.
Built from scratch a form manager library (using XState) that generates a form based on a simple JSON object and abstracts out all complex logic like state management, validation, formatting, submitting, loading animation, and more.
Developed numerous features for both React Web and React Native, and wrote unit tests using Jest, Testing Library, and Enzyme.
Optimized individual end-to-end test cases (built with WebdriverIO) and built a system leveraging AWS Device Farm to split end-to-end tests into 50 instances, cutting down test time from 40 minutes to 7 minutes.
2017 — 2020
Vietnam, Singapore
React Web, React Native, AngularJS, ExpressJS, MongoDB, Highcharts, Firebase, Sketch, Tableau
Founded and managed the entire product team of the most advanced apartment marketplace in Vietnam (Airbnb-like, for residential rentals) on React/React Native. The platform reached 200,000 users within the first 2 years serving 1,500 finders every day.
Built from scratch the entire stack of the marketplace including mobile apps on React Native, APIs on Express.js, and database with MongoDB.
Developed from scratch the entire authentication system to replace Firebase due to its low performance in Asia. Created a concurrency system to sync users' offline data across multiple devices.
Migrated all of the AngularJS components from the web app to React Native while rewriting ZERO lines of controller code.
Used data analytics to identify and rewrite several MongoDB queries with performance issues.
Created a roommate-matching algorithm based on 22 different lifestyle qualities. Built a dynamic form wizard where each step adapts to answers in the previous steps. The wizard engine is decoupled enough to be reused on both React Native and Angular.
Built several admin features on React including data charts (with Highcharts), CRMs, and user management.
Developed from scratch a simpler alternative to Redux but highly tailored to the current system.
Developed financial models, laid out business strategy, raised funding, and participated in strategic investor meetings.
Designed from scratch the UI/UX, and branding of the product with Sketch and, later on, led the product design team.
Developed Tableau charts connected to MongoDB to perform data analytics resulting in 2x the GMV of the marketplace.
2014 — 2016
Greater Atlanta Area
Built a software engineer team in Ho Chi Minh city as augmented staff members for the AngularJS team at Weather.com (based in Atlanta, GA).
Facilitated remote collaboration between dev teams distributed on the two opposite sides of the globe.
Participated in the sales, management, and operations—growing the company to 15 engineers.
Education
2011 — 2012
Georgia Institute of Technology
Computer Science
2011 — 2012
2010 — 2011
Clayton State University
Computer Science
2010 — 2011