Engineering leader — HashiCorp (an IBM company)
I’ve spent a decade building software and the last five years leading the people who build it. These days I think of myself less as a maker and more as a gardener — most of what I do is help things grow: turning a rough idea into a shipped product, coaching an engineer into a role they’re reaching for, steadying a team through a reorg or an acquisition.
based in washington, dc
I lead engineering teams, and I’ve been at it for about five years now, after a decade building full-stack software. Most of that work has been user-facing: web, mobile, voice, and CLI interfaces, plus the odd OTT device.
I think products start with people. The teams that ship things users actually like are the ones where engineers feel safe enough to disagree with each other in the open, and empowered enough to make hard calls along the way. A lot of my job is building and protecting that.
The rest of it is helping things grow, and helping them hold together while they do. I’ve spent most of my career inside some version of flux: a migration, a reorg, an acquisition, a team inheriting a system nobody wants to own. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like the exception and started feeling like the job. It’s the part I’m best at.
I don’t write much production code day to day, but I still do some system design and dig into thorny bugs when it helps. On the technical side, I’ve mostly lived in TypeScript and the React / React Native ecosystem, with enough Python, PHP, Go, and Elixir to be useful, and I’m comfortable across AWS and other cloud providers, containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and CI/CD. I think of myself as part of the whole loop: from the first sketch through development and into people’s hands, then back to the whiteboard with data, what we learned, and the next set of hypotheses.
Growing people
Hiring, one-on-ones that aren’t status updates, and coaching engineers into leads. I’ve trained technical leads to own design and planning, and helped junior engineers make the jump from doing tasks to owning problems.
Shipping product
Taking something from a rough idea to a release real users touch: redesigned apps, design systems, experiences across various different devices. Usually as the person keeping scope honest and the team unblocked.
Leading through change
Acquisitions, reorgs, and large migrations. I tend to arrive mid-transition and work as the steady hand while the team keeps shipping.
Engineering Manager
Hashicorp, an IBM Company
I manage the Terraform Core team (we build Terraform Community Edition). I joined right as the IBM acquisition closed and made it my job to be the steady hand while the team shipped a run of new language features. I also set up a cross-org communication plan to get us out of synchronous status meetings, and led a tiger team working on what Terraform’s tooling needs to look like in an agentic world.
Director of Engineering
Audacy Inc.
Directed a 22-engineer org. I helped split it into three feature teams across web and mobile, picked up product ownership for all three, and trained three engineers to be technical leads so the design and planning work stopped funneling through me.
Engineering Manager
Audacy Inc.
Managed a seven-person team and acted as technical lead for the wider 22-engineer client-app org. I did systems architecture where it was needed and oversaw the JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration of our shared client services SDK. Helped lead efforts to develop and ship the redesigned “A2” React web and React Native apps to millions of monthly active users and more than half a million daily listeners.
Tech Lead / Engineering Manager
Cubic Digital Intelligence
Managed and mentored five engineers while advising two other projects. I led the “devopsify” push that gave us a real GitLab CI/CD pipeline, helped break a monolith into containerized services for Kubernetes, and took over the frontend team to lead a new design system and a React SPA rebuild.
Senior Software Engineer
NPR
Converted NPR One from JavaScript to TypeScript and wrote the standards the rest of engineering used. Led some of the containerization work for NPR’s first on-prem-to-AWS migrations, and mentored two junior engineers. Also led “Play NPR” on Google Assistant and helped build NPR’s Alexa “Continuous Listening Experience” — Alexa Skill of the Year, Project Voice 2020.
Web Developer
TEKSystems (NPR Contractor)
Built a new React and Redux editor for the NPR CMS — including a Medium-style inline formatting picker and paste support that survived contact with Word, Google Docs, and whatever else editors pasted from.
Web Developer
Atlantic Media Strategies
Built responsive frontend components from mockups and custom WordPress post types to fit client content needs, plus a few data-driven full-stack apps on the MEAN and MERN stacks.
CMS/Web Developer
SevenTwenty Strategies
Built and launched responsive sites on ExpressionEngine and WordPress, and pushed the team to adopt a mobile-first approach.
Earlier career
Pastoral ministry, TNS, and more
Before software became my career, I spent about a decade in pastoral ministry: youth pastor and music director, then lead pastor of a ~ 250-person congregation, coordinating volunteers and leading several ongoing programs. In the same stretch I did my first paid dev work, scripting and bug fixes on internal network-monitoring software at Transaction Network Services. That professional experience built on years of web work as a volunteer and hobbyist. Earlier still, I was assistant manager at Frank Parsons Paper Company (big Dunder-Mifflin vibes), running inventory and delivery logistics.
If you’re looking for a mentor, steering a team through a hard transition, or just want to compare notes on engineering leadership, shoot me an email!
EMAIL TOMMY → or find me on LinkedIn →