Tom Scanlan — Resume

Tom Scanlan Principal engineer · Louisville, KY · Remote OK · Open to relocation tompscanlan@gmail.com · github.com/tompscanlan · linkedin.com/in/tomscanlan · openmeet.net Summary Hands-on principal engineer with 25+ years building and shipping production software, still writing code every day. Deep across the stack: TypeScript/NestJS services, Kubernetes platform engineering, observability, and production LLM integration with bounded cost and latency. Past work: shipped into multimillion-line enterprise platforms, unlocked $100M+ in U.S. federal contract eligibility with 2,000 lines of targeted Java, and mentored engineers through the cross-team problems that stall organizations. Core Skills - Languages  TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python, Java, shell - Platform  Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Azure, GCP, bare-metal automation - Delivery & Observability  GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Loki - Data & Messaging  PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS, MQTT - Security  TLS/PKI (cert-manager), Sealed Secrets, Kubernetes RBAC - AI/LLM  OpenAI & Anthropic APIs, cost-bounded routing, async generation, prompt iteration, Claude Code Experience Founder & Principal Engineer, OpenMeet LLC | 2024–Present Open-source, federated alternative to Meetup, removing the pricing barrier that excludes grassroots community organizers. Sole architect and operator of a production system, end to end. - Architected and built a six-service TypeScript/NestJS backend with a Quasar/Vue frontend; stateful workloads (PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch) on self-hosted Kubernetes - Implemented AT Protocol federation for decentralized identity and data portability; integrated Matrix for real-time community chat - Run the full delivery loop solo: GitHub Actions and ArgoCD CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm), and an observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry/Jaeger) that supports same-day diagnosis of production incidents - Designed and shipped LLM-powered features: a survey builder that turns a research question into a structured survey, and an event-ingestion pipeline normalizing unstructured data (scraped pages, forwarded emails) via cheap-model-first, escalate-on-low-confidence routing that bounds per-request cost - Production LLM patterns: async generation off the request path via RabbitMQ workers, response caching, graceful UI degradation when models are slow or unavailable - Operate production infrastructure end to end: deployments, upgrades, capacity, incident response, and TLS/PKI plus Sealed Secrets-based secrets management Senior Sales Engineering Architect, RackN | 2024 Pre-sales role weighted 75% toward engineering spikes that shipped as product features in Digital Rebar, a Go-based bare-metal provisioning platform. - Developed and shipped Proxmox hypervisor support, extending out-of-the-box automation to a new class of infrastructure - Built deployment images and authored provisioning automations (shell, templated workflows) spanning hardware bring-up through software configuration - Diagnosed customer deployment issues live on support calls (PXE boot, networking, bare-metal lifecycle) and turned field feedback into platform fixes Application Platforms Architect, VMware Inc. | 2020–2023 - Identified and resolved year-long Azure Government Cloud blockers across a 60-service Kubernetes application, unlocking $100M+ in U.S. federal contract eligibility with 2,000 lines of targeted Java - Shipped features into a multimillion-line enterprise platform serving 10,000+ global customers - Built a repeatable cross-functional process to identify and close 15 high-value product gaps ($5M+ each), converting ambiguous customer signals into shipped roadmap items - Mentored engineers across teams on system design, technical growth, and career development Architect, Emerging Technology, VMware Inc. | 2018–2020 - Built curriculum and hands-on training for 3,000 consultants covering DevOps, Kubernetes, IoT, edge computing, and multi-cloud architectures - Built a working IoT ML pipeline (sensor data to trained classifiers to recommendations) as a teaching instrument demonstrating end-to-end ML integration and safe data-movement patterns - Developed DevOps and cloud-native practice capabilities adopted across a $1B professional services organization; published a weekly internal technical blog Senior Consultant, VMware Inc. (via MomentumSI acquisition) | 2014–2018 - Introduced containers, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices to VMware PSO; trained hundreds of consultants - Delivered infrastructure reliability and automation engagements (configuration management, CI/CD, cloud migration) at Capital One, Comcast, FedEx, and similar large enterprises Early Career (1997–2014) Senior Linux Systems Administrator, The Learning House (2013–2014). Led IT for a $15M education platform; scaled storage throughput 10x, introduced Puppet/Git configuration management, automated cloud deploy/destroy cycles to cut hosting costs. Founder & Operator, RiverSong Farm (2008–2012). Restored a fallow farm into a working market-garden and poultry operation; four years building something physical, end to end. Embedded networking & systems software (2003–2007). Senior Software Engineer at Iptivia, Sereniti, and Reefedge: Linux kernel patches, cross-platform ports, PXE boot systems. Linux & network engineering (1999–2003). Built and operated infrastructure across three datacenters at Corente and Ecampus.com. Founder, SquareFish Media (1998–2000). Co-founded a web/media startup; acquired by a regional ISP. Education Computer Science, University of Kentucky (three years completed)