Tommy Sullivan

Castle Risk Online is an online multiplayer board game with chat, animations, and AI players. It supports social login, mobile, dark mode, and is a blast to play with family and friends.

The game is built with React, with jotai for atomic state management on the frontend, and optimistic state synchronization viaWebSockets, proxied thru a K8s (Kubernetes) ingress controller equipped with Cert Manager to the underlying Express JS servers, which autoscale based on tcp connection rules, and use RxJS for Functional Programming stream processing of game events.

Key Results

• Launched fully functional multiplayer game with realtime chat, social login, mobile + desktop support, dark mode
• Achieved <200ms latency for real-time game state synchronization across all players
• Kubernetes + Skaffold used for cloud-agnostic deployments

I joined pull.systems as a contractor to help get it to a v1 after its seed round, where it was spun up out of an incubator and funded by Porsche, also its first paying customer. It is an EV analytics platform that analyzes vehicle data and telemetry to predict anomalies, patterns, and ultimately assist the customer in identifying problems and investment tradeoffs.

Key Results

• Led 5-person squad delivering Pattern Editor enabling custom anomaly detection workflows
• Processed 10M+ daily records with type-safe SQL queries using Kysely
• Improved hiring velocity conducting 30+ technical interviews while building product

From the Intertru.ai website: Eliminating Bad Hiring From Planet Earth: The uncomfortable, unspoken truth is that most interviews are driven by gut feelings fueled by bias, assumptions, and personal motives. Making every hire an expensive gamble. Intertru fixes this.

I joined intertru as a lead contractor during their pre-seed phase to help them get a working v1. After achieving that, I handed the reigns to the full time team, but I still consult with their CEO from time to time on business and technical strategy.

Key Results

• Delivered MVP in 6 weeks enabling rapid iteration on customer interview workflows
• Built AI-powered candidate evaluation dashboard enabling data-driven hiring decisions
• Reduced time-to-create interview templates by 70% with intuitive UI design

Appen AI (formerly Figure Eight) is a leading AI automation company serving many of the top 50 tech companies, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and many others. After meeting their CTO and VP of Engineering, I was convinced I could help kickstart some stalled efforts and empower the engineering teams by moving their DevOps practice from a central team to a practice within teams.

I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Senior Director of Engineering after only a year, before ultimately moving on once Generative AI and in-house AI operations displaced much of Appen's business.

Key Results

• Reduced deployment lead time by 75% enabling product teams to self-serve infrastructure
• Unified authentication across 4 legacy systems reducing login friction by 85%
• Decreased inter-team ticket volume by ~60% through developer empowerment

Sourceability is an electronic component parts middleman and distributor with quality check facilities around the globe, that undertook to digitize a very email, excel and connection based industry of finding and purchasing huge BOMs of electronic component parts for manufacturers around the globe.

Key Results

• Secured $3M analytics API contract within 3 months of product launch
• Achieved 400% increase in organic search index uptake thru SEO optimization
• Enabled team to deploy on day one reducing time-to-first-deploy from weeks to hours

Heartpoints.org is a non-profit that aims to create a blockchain currency for "good", that would encourage folks to do good works for people, and in exchange, get help from others, or simply promote the idea of helping others through their attainment of heartpoints.

Key Results

• Built blockchain-based "proof-of-good" currency prototype with off-chain validation
• Motivated a team of 5 to ideate and experiment on making the world a better place

MapR Technologies was one of the top 3 Hadoop Distribution and Service companies (the other two being Cloudera and Hortonworks). It was an exciting organization to work for with an excellent product offering. In my time there I saw it evolve significantly in terms of size, product value, adoption of software craftsmanship best practices, and market opportunity.

I was awarded two “MapR Star Awards” from our leadership team, and I owe that in part to a great group of colleagues, who helped me champion self-service devops as a discipline (as opposed to a separate team that added more friction than value).

I was a key participant in the Employee Advisory Group, helping steer culture from the grassroots while building directional consensus among peers in leadership roles as well as my superiors

Key Results

• Unified 5 disparate DevOps tools into single portal reducing context switching by 80%
• Trained 8+ engineers in Scala and functional programming with Coursera certifications
• Implemented comprehensive observability across Hadoop stack monitoring 100+ metrics

Lookout was my first job in the SF Bay Area. They provided a mobile security application that used various techniques to detect malware or risk on apple and android products, including by running applications and looking for runtime signatures of malware as well as performing static analysis of the source and binaries, within the constraints of the google and apple technology platforms and app stores.

Lookout exposed me to automated environment creation including dev environments with vagrant and docker as well as the culture of startups in the Bay.

Key Results

• Trained 10+ engineers in functional programming concepts increasing Scala adoption by 40%
• Authored scale test automation exercising 4 integrated stacks identifying 20+ scaling bottlenecks
• Created reusable workshop materials adopted by 3 additional engineering / qa teams

Explorys was a spin-off of Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University that sought to apply big data via hadoop to improve health care by identifying cohorts of interest, predicting medical outcomes, and more.

Having spent 7 years in Enterprise at Progressive Insurance I wanted to get back into startup mode and live fast and take risks, and so I ultimately was persuaded to join.

Key Results

• Delivered new admin dashboard supporting 10+ healthcare organizations
• Enhanced MDL enabling complex temporal healthcare measure definitions
• Reduced user management operations time by 65% with streamlined UI

I was hired at Progressive Insurance because of my Actionscript expertise, gained running my own agency, Cleveweb.com, which they needed to beat their competition in the Web 2.0 game.

I quickly climbed the ranks from contractor to senior to lead by delivering results and being the go-to web developer on a large 20 person team.

I eventually made REF 2.0 (UI Framework), used by multiple teams; and CQM (Code Quality Metrics), to automatically test and enforce code quality thru metrics, as well as other developer productivity and quality enhancing tools.

I was one of 12 consultants as the business looked to scale our XP discipline as part of Enterprise SDLC Adoption.

Key Results

• Reduced requirements-to-deployment cycle time by ~35% on key projects through Agile adoption
• Reduced complex quote page render time by 93% (from 28 seconds to 2 seconds)
• Implemented automated quality gates across 12 development teams reducing production bugs significantly

Partnered with Brulant (now Rosetta) to lead development of interactive video-based “Retirement Readiness” web application for Nationwide Insurance App. Complex UI requirements such as multiple paths, content delivery, streaming, caching / preloading of dynamic video sequences, and frequent interaction with backend Java server necessitated a robust and highly performance-tuned design.

Key Results

• Delivered interactive retirement app generating 10k+ user assessments in first 6 months
• Increased cross-sell conversion rate by 18% through personalized product recommendations
• Achieved WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility compliance with video captions and screen reader support

I created Cleveland Entertainers with business partner and Guiness World Record holder ricksmithjr.com to provide entertainment services to families and businesses in northeast Ohio.

Customers included Cleveland Indians (now, Guardians), Cleveland Cavaliers, Jewish Community Federation, and 100s of small and medium sized Businesses

I sold my part of the business in 2007, and while today it continues as a high-touch human-driven business, it was originally a self-service portal where entertainers could see booking requests and customers could book entirely online.

Key Results

• Generated 500+ entertainment bookings annually through optimized SEO
• Managed operations for entertainment company booking 500+ events annually
• Integrated Salesforce CRM automating 70% of booking workflow processes

While double majoring in piano performance and computer science, I started Cleveweb.com to fund my schooling and housing, while providing web design, development and hosting services to about 15 different companies in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area.

Through this experience, I was forced to learn all aspects of the business, as well as the seriousness of investing one's own money and time into a business that cannot afford to be wasteful.

Initially, I provided virtual hosting services via a rented rack, but later I brought in high speed network connections to my office and hosted services on several high powered linux boxes that I administered and maintained.

This portfolio of projects helped me land a full time contract and later employment with Progressive Insurance in a Senior and then Lead-level role.

Key Results

• Increased online product inquiries by 750% within first year of launch
• Built searchable art gallery database with 80+ artworks and 25+ artists
• Delivered full website with animated product demo increasing lead conversion by 40%

As part of the step-up program in my high school, I was able to intern, and later work for, ExchangeNet, which became Core.com, an ISP (Internet Service Provider) operating in the great lakes region .

It was here that I was first exposed to the Internet, and at a time where 56k phone-based modems were the standard, it was really cool getting to see how fast the internet was at an ISP's office!

I worked full time at this job to pay for college next door at Cleveland State University, where I double majored in computer science and piano performance.

Key Results

• Maintained 95%+ customer satisfaction score resolving 50+ support tickets weekly
• Reduced average ticket resolution time by 40% through systematic troubleshooting
• Enabled 50+ customers to successfully host websites on Apache virtual hosts