# Tim Sturge > Data, Scale and Platform Expert Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/timsturge I'm a builder at heart. I've worked on, led and delivered many successful backend projects including core data platform, search, data analytics at high scale (>10k QPS) and with high reliability (>99.99%). I also have significant experience with query language and API design. (I've written production ready query languages, designed and implemented company wide data platforms and co-ordinated the migration to and adoption of these across significant businesses). I am language and technology agnostic; it's about choosing the right tool for the job. Finding that tool is often the most critical decision: the best software is usually the software you didn't have to build yourself. ## Work Experience ### Principal Engineer @ dbt Labs Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States At dbt I assist engineering teams collaborate more effectively on current and future technical architecture. ### Principal Engineer @ Twilio Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area I designed and implemented large parts of TDS, Twilio's next-generation internal OLTP data platform. My work involved partnering with internal customers to better understand their data handling needs, designing and building client libraries, server middleware, database management frameworks and data migration automation. Our users were able to both simplify their codebases (moving away from per product data access code to shared infrastructure) and we increased the overall reliability of data storage across the organization. ### Sabbatical @ Freelance, self-employed Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 Travelled extensively -- the highlight being a month in Central Asia. Moved back from New York to San Francisco and re-established myself in the Bay Area. ### Chief Technology Officer @ Octane Lending Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area As CTO at Octane Lending, a financial startup in the powersports lending space, I enabled the technology team to deliver critical financial products and features including a prime loan offerings, a leasing and tax product, a fraud engine, and a loan servicing platform. I also helped the company to better understand the agile development process and tightened collaboration between business stakeholders and technology teams. ### VP Engineering @ Spring Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area At Spring I ran the engineering organization. I grew the org from 20 to more than 50, restructuring it from a single team into multiple functional teams with independent management. The teams rebuilt the order management platform and internal API layers and delivered multiple new business initiatives including cash back and syndication. ### Head of Engineering @ GoButler Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 At GoButler I started and built the engineering organization to 9 people in 6 months. We launched an iOS app, internal operations tools, NLP technology and various API integrations. ### Director of Engineering @ Zendesk Jan 2010 – Jan 2014 Lead the backend engineering team responsible for designing, implementing, scaling and enhancing all services underlying the product. Successful projects included database sharding, high reliability, multi datacenter architecture, real-time search and product analytics services. During my tenure Zendesk traffic grew more than 20x and become one of Alexa's top 500 internet sites. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 At Google I was part of the initial team designing and building F1, the next generation database infrastructure underlying Google Adwords and the query and aggregation layer of CloudSpanner. ### Lead Engineer @ Metaweb Technologies Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 Metaweb built a large graph structured knowledge base (Freebase) that now powers Google Knowledge Graph. At Metaweb I was the lead developer and language designer for the Metaweb Query Language (http://mql.freebaseapps.com/) which is the interface and query language used to add data to and retrieve data from the knowledge graph. ### Technical Yahoo @ Yahoo Jan 1998 – Jan 2005 One of the first 4 engineers on My Yahoo!, I later ran the core services of login and registration before working on spam prevention at scale in Yahoo! Mail. I'm most proud of the scale we achieved in the early days of the internet (when everyone was still figuring out how to scale to 1000's of queries per second) ## Education ### Master's Degree University of Michigan ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/timsturge - Portfolio: https://timsturge.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/timsturge JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/timsturge/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12