# Thomas Young > Software Engineer and Amateur Mycologist Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/thomasyoung My name is Thomas Young, a software engineer, amateur mycologist, and artist living in Oakland, CA. Throughout my life, I've spent as much time as possible diving into anything and everything that piques my curiosity. My latest adventure is Cluster Mush, a business where I create fungal artwork and pair it with educational material on my website. Each piece is accompanied by a page where the new owner can read about the cultural significance and historical context, along with insights from scientific journals on their new mushroom piece. This has been a wild ride, especially since I had no prior experience with running a business, 3D modeling complex organic shapes, and had only started learning about fungi a year before starting the business. Before Cluster Mush, I worked on the AWS GameSparks service, providing backend infrastructure for game developers so they could focus more on the creative aspects of game development. I helped create the GameSparks Unity game engine plugin, developed a demo game to showcase the service to potential customers, perspective hires, and on Twitch live streams, and led the implementation of the billing and customer metering pipeline, which processed billable user events for AWS billing. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Probably Genetic Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Founder @ Cluster Mush Jan 2023 – Present | Seattle, Washington, United States Cluster Mush’s goal is to promote appreciation and understanding of fungi through fungal art and education • Synthesized scholarly articles, videos, and books about fungi into accessible and engaging content. • Developed an interactive map using HTML and JavaScript to dynamically pull and display articles. • Reduced production time by 50% for miniature fungal sculptures and jewelry by parallelizing tasks and exploring various methodologies, saving days of work per batch of 30-60 earrings. • Managed business tasks, including license acquisition, taxes, marketing, and customer support. • Established a cohesive brand aesthetic through thoughtful selection of colors, shapes, materials, fonts, and logo design. ### Software Development Engineer II @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Seattle, Washington, United States • Advanced to Software Development Engineer II while in this team due to my demonstrated accountability, technical skills, and commitment to a growth mindset, showcasing my ability to take on increased responsibility and project impact. • Designed and led the implementation of the billing and customer metering data pipeline using Java and AWS, capable of processing over 2 million billable events per second, ensuring seamless onboarding in collaboration with the team PM and AWS Billing team. • Identified and resolved flaky tests in our web console's functional test suite caused by time-dependent testing. Transitioned to an event-driven approach based on Cypress testing guidelines, reducing failures in the CI/CD pipeline and enhancing overall test stability. • Worked on GameSparks Unity game engine integration, researching serialization libraries, collaborating with technical documentation writers, and implementing core functionality using C# and C++. • Developed a GameSparks service demo within two weeks for a last-minute Twitch livestream, which garnered over 1,000 views. This demo later became instrumental in showcasing GameSparks to potential external customers and prospective hires. • Proposed and implemented a centralized package to manage IAM permissions across all backend AWS CDK packages owned by the GameSparks team, reducing code duplication and strengthening security compliance across more than five packages. • Integrated internal AWS business metrics into the GameSparks web console by thoroughly researching page tagging and interaction logging. Developed comprehensive documentation and presented detailed findings to leadership, including examples on querying and visualizing data. These metrics became essential for assessing customer impact during high-severity events. ### Software Development Engineer @ Amazon Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Seattle, Washington, United States • Developed the onboarding experience for Alexa on third-party televisions using Java, TypeScript, and React • Added functionality to Alexa IOS and Android apps to support locating third-party televisions sharing the same Wi-Fi network. • Collaborated closely with QA engineers to pinpoint and resolve issues in the Alexa third-party television onboarding process and within the Alexa mobile app. • Started a sub-committee to improve documentation by identifying gaps and organizing the internal wiki. Proposed bi-weekly 30-60 minute meetings where engineers would review or create documentation for team-owned software and infrastructure. Another engineer would follow the document and provide feedback for the next session. ### Student Technician @ University of Colorado Boulder Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Boulder, Colorado • Assisted students and faculty in diagnosing and troubleshooting electronic device issues, installing software, and answering general questions. • Led a summer project to improve services and create a more welcoming environment for customers. ### Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Over a 12-week internship, I developed a testing framework in Java and AWS for third-party Alexa device developers to test prototypes, significantly reducing onboarding time from over a month to just one week. ### Student Assistant II @ NCAR - The National Center for Atmospheric Research Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Boulder, Colorado Collaborated with environmental scientists from NCAR's Regional Integrated Science Collective, processing and visualizing high-dimensional map datasets using NCAR Command Language (NCL) and Python. ### Camp Counselor / Coding Studio Lead @ Steve and Kate's Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area I introduced children in grades K-8 to programming through engaging and interactive lessons, while also contributing to the smooth operation of the camp by facilitating organized activities. ## Education ### Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science University of Colorado Boulder Jan 2016 – Jan 2020 ### High School in High School/Secondary Diplomas and Certificates Berkeley High Jan 2012 – Jan 2016 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/thomasy314 --- Source: https://flows.cv/thomasyoung JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/thomasyoung/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22