Thomas Getgood
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Montreal, QC, Canada
Toptal member since August 3, 2020
Thomas is an entrepreneur with a strong background in pure mathematics and machine learning. Over the past decade, he has worked with many clients, including startups, on a range of projects within the music, science, and healthcare industries. He has built and led teams to project success, designed and implemented prototypes, and understands how to migrate infrastructure to enable scaling effectively. Thomas excels at problem-solving and has the temperament of a factotum.
Portfolio
Experience
- DevOps - 12 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 10 years
- Architecture - 9 years
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - 9 years
- Clojure - 7 years
- Terraform - 7 years
- React - 5 years
- Kubernetes - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Emacs, Linux
The most amazing...
...team I built was for a startup I co-founded applying AI techniques to cancer therapy research.
Work Experience
Developer and Consultant
Freelance
- Wrote a tool to perform analytics on repositories using GitHub's GraphQL API.
- Refactored a codebase for transparency and readability in preparation for an audit.
- Analyzed code delivered to a client by an external company, tested it for completeness and correctness, and wrote an evaluation of the outsourcing company based on the deliverable.
- Wrote a single-page app to provide a medical tool based on the research published by clients.
- Gathered requirements for the technical infrastructure of a prospective medical study, vetted external vendors, and evaluated proposals.
- Helped a small startup with one developer push an MVP out in time for a scheduled sales pitch. Developed an analytics dashboard to center the pitch narrative. Helped debug and streamline the MVP to make the best possible impression.
- Joined a small team as the main (initially only) DevOps expert inside a large enterprise. Transitioned the cloud architecture to IaC, ultimately allowing the transition of all services between Kubernetes clusters without downtime.
- Integrated a WebRTC-based video chat into a client's app and used 3rd-party machine learning APIs to track who was present in the teleconference as people dynamically came and left the conference rooms.
AWS Specialist
Boyd Info Group
- Reviewed the client's AWS setup and compared it to their application's needs based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Created new dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch to evaluate the chosen size of the allocated resources.
- Advised the client on two possible ways to reduce costs.
- Assisted the client in implementing the best cost-saving strategy for their business.
Cloud DevOps | AWS Expert
Endeavor - Main
- Migrated the team's infrastructure from deployment scripts into Terraform code and Kubernetes configuration (GitOps). Modularized IaC code allows developers to spin up the infrastructure needed to develop new services rapidly.
- Developed and instantiated an architecture to allow migration of services from one Kubernetes cluster to another to allow core infrastructure upgrades with minimal (and eventually zero) downtime.
- Managed and automated access control to dozens of internal services via Auth0 and a custom internal service to allow access requests and approvals and maintain an auditable single source of truth regarding access permissions.
- Aided and extended CI/CD infrastructure to improve deployment times and reliability. Migrated pipelines between providers for improved deployment time and cost. Ensured automated scanning of artifacts to preempt vulnerabilities.
- Supported the analytics environment and ML pipelines for the analytics team. Continuously adapted architecture to novel needs and capabilities. Deployed ephemeral infrastructure to prove our new prototype solutions.
- Migrated compute to spot instances and ephemeral infrastructure to reduce the cost footprint of Kubernetes clusters substantially.
Technical Consultant
Research Institute, McGill University Health Centre
- Gathered requirements to collect, store, and process imaging, genomic, and lifestyle information for a long-term longitudinal cardiac health study.
- Met with technology vendors to assess available commercial software solutions and acted as a translator between tech teams and medical researchers.
- Attended conferences to assess available open source tools and meet with potential collaborators for the study.
- Contributed to technical aspects of the research protocol.
CTO
CSTS Semion
- Led the design and implementation of the initial prototype and the platform it grew into.
- Analyzed the needs of the platform and surveyed the current open-source ecosystem to inform architectural direction.
- Assisted in developing the hiring policy and established a culture that rewards creative, rigorous solutions.
- Built a great team capable of tackling problems beyond the capabilities of the initial three co-founders.
- Oversaw the development process, issue tracking, delivery schedules, and milestones.
- Communicated the platform's current state and future direction to customers and potential customers.
Machine Learning Lead
Tastefilter, Inc.
- Designed and wrote a recommendation engine for a music discovery app.
- Took over the back-end infrastructure migration from JavaScript to Scala as the scale became challenging.
- Contributed to the front-end development as the need arose.
Full-stack Web Developer
Evolving Web
- Built sites for clients in Drupal, Rails, and JavaScript.
- Submitted patches to open-source tools and frameworks used.
- Contributed to internal continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
Game AI Developer
Norhside inc.
- Maintained and extended several components of a natural language processing pipeline used to generate an in-game dialog on the fly.
- Contributed to R&D planning meetings to set future direction.
- Play-tested the game more strictly than necessary.
Experience
Experiments in Language Design
https://github.com/tgetgood/exprlA Clinical Calculator for Cardiac Care
https://github.com/tgetgood/statin-benefitThis page was written for clients at a medical research center who needed a quick way to check the model on their phones without finding a computer and starting up RStudio.
Openmind
https://github.com/openmindanesth/openmindMy work is on the technical side of the project (code, deployment). A short abstract describing the scientific goals can be found in the link provided.
Education
Master of Science Degree in Mathematics
McGill University - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Bachelor of Science Degree in Pure Mathematics
McGill University - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, React, Vue, WebRTC, Vulkan
Tools
Terraform, Emacs, Reagent, AWS CloudFormation, Chef, Auth0, MATLAB, Istio, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon CloudFront
Languages
JavaScript, Clojure, Python, SQL, CSS, Java, GraphQL, Scala, C#, PHP, R, Julia, Rust, TypeScript, Snowflake, XML
Frameworks
ClojureScript, Re-frame, AngularJS, Flux, Ruby on Rails (RoR), .NET, Next.js
Paradigms
Continuous Deployment, Rapid Prototyping, DevOps, Automation, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Scalable Application, Requirements Analysis, HIPAA Compliance, Microservices, Azure DevOps, Microservices Architecture, Serverless Architecture
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, Linux, Drupal, Azure IaaS, Android, Jupyter Notebook, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda
Storage
PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, NoSQL, Datadog, Neo4j, MongoDB, Databases, Azure Active Directory, Web Forms, Amazon DynamoDB
Other
Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Full-stack, Architecture, Prototyping, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Algorithms, AWS DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, APIs, Software Architecture, Software Design, Cloud Architecture, AWS Cloud Architecture, Datomic, Machine Learning, MVP Design, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), System Administration, Scalable Architecture, Full-stack Development, Technical Consulting, Statistics, Excel 365, Data Science, Web Scraping, Programming Language Design, LLVM, Mathematics, Pulumi, Service Meshes, Monitoring, Analytics, Relational Algebra, GitOps, Single Sign-on (SSO), Leadership, Web Development, Cost Analysis, Cost Control, Technical Leadership, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Team Leadership, Compliance, Protocol Design, GDPR, Data Privacy, Information Security, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Networking, ECS, Cost Reduction & Optimization (Cost-down), Cloudflare, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Recommendation Systems, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
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