Tom Most

Fullstack & platform software engineer

San Francisco Bay Area

About

I’m a generalist software engineer with a strong eye for detail and a bias towards quality. I've worked on web apps, distributed systems, and platform engineering at companies from seed to mid-cap. I'm passionate about climate, energy transition, and building science. Recruiters: I am located in the North Bay area and only open to opportunities that are fully remote or local to Sonoma/Marin. I will not commute or relocate to SF or the peninsula.

Experience

  • Principal Software Engineer at Utilidata
    Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 10 mos

  • Software Engineer at Lumen Energy
    Jul 2021 - Apr 2024 · 2 yrs 10 mos

    Second engineer working to deploy solar energy on the nation's buildings through energy and financial modeling. - Full-stack feature development in collaboration with designers and stakeholders. - Forward deployment with energy analysts, working to improve their productivity. - Monolithic PostgreSQL + Python (Flask) + GraphQL + TypeScript (React/Next.js) stack to maximize agility as the company searched for product/market fit, with some Rust for performance. Code reviews, incident response, and mentorship of junior engineers.

  • Sr. Software Engineer, Blue Planet at Ciena
    Aug 2015 - Jul 2021 · 6 yrs

    Platform engineering for the Blue Planet Orchestrator (akin to Kubernetes for telecom networks); Python/infrastructure specialist. - Integrated applications with Blue Planet: service discovery, monitoring, metrics, etc. Formalized patterns as a library used in 40+ microservices. - Owned a FaaS job execution service (written in Twisted Python): integrated with an event bus; redesigned its queuing protocol to add features; created tooling to allow users to manage dependencies for air-gapped deployments; and performed scale testing to discover potential bottlenecks. - Owned a Kafka client library, Afkak: ported to Python 3; fixed numerous bugs; and improved its test coverage. Performed code reviews, debugged distributed systems, responded to incident escalations, and maintained integration test suites and AWS-hosted CI pipelines.

  • Cyan, Inc. (Petaluma, CA · On-site)
    • Software Engineer, Blue Planet
      Jan 2015 - Aug 2015 · 8 mos

      - Containerization of databases and microservices for a network orchestration product. - Spearheaded standardization of structured logging in a containerized, polyglot deployment scenario including design, documentation, and development of Python and Java libraries.

    • Software Engineer, Planet View
      Jun 2011 - Aug 2015 · 4 yrs 3 mos

      - Full stack development of a SaaS network monitoring system. - Development, deployment, profiling, and optimization of backend systems in Twisted Python and Django, backing to Cassandra and PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS. GUI development in Sencha ExtJS.