# Tom Collier > Staff Engineer | 30 Years Building AI/ML Platforms, Data Infrastructure & Startups | Ex-Founder & CTO | Technical Advisor Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/tomcollier Senior engineering leader with 30 years of hands-on experience building AI/ML platforms, data infrastructure, and scaling startups from the ground up. Currently Staff Engineer at Block (CashApp) building compliance and ML systems. Previously architected ML-driven optimization platforms at Apartment List and was Co-founder/CTO at ShortForm. I'm now offering technical advisory services to help early-stage AI/ML startups build robust, secure, and scalable technical foundations—the kind of work I've been doing internally for years, now available to startups who need experienced technical guidance. WHAT I OFFER: • Technical audits and architecture reviews for AI/ML products • Security, observability, and engineering velocity assessments • Platform engineering and data infrastructure strategy • Technical due diligence support • Engineering team mentorship and best practices RECENT EXPERIENCE: • Staff Engineer at Block: Built Identity Resolution Platform serving compliance and trust systems • Staff Engineer at Apartment List: Architected ML-driven revenue optimization systems • CTO & Co-founder at ShortForm: Led product development from 0 to scale • Technical Governance Board member with company-wide architectural authority EXPERTISE: AI/ML platforms | Data infrastructure | Distributed systems | Technical leadership | Startup scaling | Security & compliance | Engineering culture ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer, Compliance Engineering & Technology @ Block Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States As a Staff Engineer at Block, I lead technical programs and architecture decisions with company-wide impact: * Tech lead for CashApp's Identity Resolution Platform, a core service used by the Compliance and the Trust organizations to keep bad actors off of CashApp * Mentorship advocate -- I'm spearheading an effort to streamline and expand a mentorship program that currently supports several hundred Engineers to work for all employees at Block * Member of the CashApp Technical Governance Board, the body responsible for broad-reaching technical strategy ### Staff Software Engineer @ Apartment List Jan 2013 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area As a Staff Engineer on the Platforms Engineering team, I was responsible for architectural and design decisions that impact the entire organization. I built services leveraging machine learning that optimize the company's revenue funnel, architected tooling that dramatically streamline internal operations, and helped steer the development of many junior engineers through mentorship. Past projects include * Architected machine learning infrastructure for A/B testing and optimization that increased conversion rates across the revenue funnel, directly impacting business outcomes * Led technical architecture reviews and established engineering best practices that improved code quality and reduced production incidents. * Led end-to-end migration from Amazon Redshift to Snowflake, navigating complex data pipeline challenges and retraining all internal customers to dramatically improve analyst productivity * Dramatically improved eventing pipeline by implementing data integrity layers and reducing latency from 1 hour down to 5 minutes. This project entailed building new infrastructure using GCP (PubSub, DataFlow, etc) to replace a third party service. * Drastically increased knowledge sharing throughout Engineering organization with engaging, thought-provoking content. * Mentored junior Engineers and sharing my passion for building software with attention paid to simplicity and consistency. ### VP of Engineering @ Byliner Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Bay Area Led team of 6 Engineers to build web and iPad-based reading app with extensive library of exclusive content. * Established all engineering practices, culture, and technical standards for early-stage startup * Made critical architectural and technology decisions under typical startup resource constraints * Shipped complete multi-platform product in under 12 months * Collaborated cross-functionally with content and business teams to prioritize and deliver features ### Co-founder and CTO @ ShortForm Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco Bay Area As co-founder and CTO, I was responsible for all technical decisions, team hiring, and product architecture from inception through scaling. * Led a team of 4 Engineers to build a real-time video curation platform from the ground up * Made innovative use of web sockets to enable "video watching parties" where hundreds of concurrent users could watch and chat about videos across YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms * Established engineering practices, CI/CD pipelines, and technical culture that enabled rapid iteration * Navigated early-stage technical tradeoffs between speed and sustainability * Key learnings: The critical importance of observability, testing, and maintainable architecture when moving fast in a startup environment ### Director of Analytic Marketing @ PBworks Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 ### Director of Business Analytics @ Meta Interfaces Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 ### Senior Member of Technical Staff @ Oracle Jan 2003 – Jan 2005 Product Development • Lead engineer for messaging system deployed on over 20,000 servers • Significantly improved usability of product administration by porting disparate tools to a single, unified web interface • Revamped administrative framework realizing 70-80% performance improvement • Coordinated with Product Management and Quality Assurance creating a thin client, which reduced client-side footprint by a factor of 100 Leadership and Communication • Founded and led Protocol Talkers, a 15-member Toastmasters (public speaking) club in the Portland office • Demonstrated products and fielded questions for the Application Server at Oracle Open World to audience of hundreds ### Professional Services @ iSpheres Jan 2000 – Jan 2002 • Led 5 member, international development team creating new administrative tool, which saved customers over $100,000 • Defined features of tool and trained customers in installation and usage • Secured first multi-million dollar deal with Fortune 500 company as principal technical member of sales team ## Education ### MBA in Marketing, Entrepreneurship University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business ### BS in Computer Science Caltech ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tcollier --- Source: https://flows.cv/tomcollier JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/tomcollier/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12