Tom Wheeler

• Architected and implemented core backend services: a double-entry, append-only accounting ledger with an OpenAPI-described REST API for other teams, and a food benefits management service. Designed its relational PostgreSQL schema with constraints enforcing immutability, plus migrations. Built to support Farmer's Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) and Senior FMNP benefits for Maryland and several other states, and enabled new revenue channels and opportunities.
• Designed stateless, highly available, cloud-native services on AWS ECS on Fargate and PostgreSQL on AWS RDS for reliability; the team owned deployments, observability and monitoring (Datadog, Sentry, AWS CloudWatch), incident response, and an on-call rotation.
• Led system design through RFC documents and set technical direction, collaborating with product and client engineering teams to build resilient, scalable, and efficient solutions.
• Worked directly with customers and benefits-assistance workers, often several times a week, mostly in development and staging environments on new features, either leading the sessions or supporting the product manager.
• Wrote unit and integration tests against real PostgreSQL with each PR, under a 100% coverage CI gate, and troubleshot customer escalations on occasional production issues.
• Exposed a balance-check endpoint for clients, enforced tenant access control across the multi-tenant services, added an audit log for the non-accounting data the append-only ledger did not cover, handled PII, and supported SOC 2 evidence and fixes.
• Adopted agentic AI coding tools to speed development, testing, and debugging; reviewed every agent-authored change before merge, with the same CI gate as a guardrail on agent-written code.

• Led project teams with product managers and designers; mentored developers through pairing, code reviews, design sessions, and team huddles.
• Co-authored, with another Staff Engineer, a Go data ingestion service on Kubernetes that automated intake of lending-partner sales lead and product life-cycle data, speeding up sales, enabling status tracking of lending applications, and driving commissions on card offers.
• Made the ELT pipeline event-driven: AWS EventBridge event notifications signaled each partner file landing, and files were consumed asynchronously. Validated each partner file against its expected schema, used PostgreSQL for raw-data storage, then normalized the partners' varying formats into a unified relational data model that fed downstream products used by data teams. Wrote raw SQL.
• Designed the service for reliability and high availability, stateless, and participated in on-call rotations, with Datadog and Sentry for observability.
• Used gRPC and Protocol Buffers for inter-service communication between the Go services.
• Wrote unit and integration tests with each PR, under a coverage threshold enforced in CI, and handled PII in lending-partner data.

• Authored a software assessment of application value to guide resource allocation and investment, and assisted clients in building more robust, up-to-date CI/CD pipelines.

• Asked back by Teem's leadership after WeWork sold the company to iOffice, returning to the same team.
• As Teem under iOffice broke up its Django monolith to address scalability, proposed Go for smaller, more efficient services and led the extraction of the search API for physical spaces into Teem's first Go microservice, on PostgreSQL, with an OpenAPI-described API; used by other engineering teams.
• Helped maintain existing Django applications, developed locally in Docker Compose.
• Performance tested the main existing services with Locust, run as part of regression testing on every release.

• Designed and built a Go identity integration, deployed on-premises inside customer networks, that syncs private LDAP/AD users and groups to Teem's user directory, with concurrent processing built on goroutines, sync.WaitGroup, and channels. It replaced a Python app; Go let us ship one self-contained binary with a backend, bundled web UI, and embedded BuntDB key-value storage. Open-sourced a BuntDB helper library as ezbunt.
• Led a 40x performance optimization of the Google user sync for all customers, measured by throughput before and after: stored-hash change detection (following the Microsoft 365 sync's etag pattern) updated only changed users, and distributed systems design ran batches concurrently across the Django server fleet, with orchestration state in Redis (AWS ElastiCache) as the source of truth. Designed for reliability: failed records were skipped and logged, and the next sync picked them up automatically because their stored state was not updated.
• Led the development team on user stories, agile process, and releases, and helped product managers define and refine new products and features.
• Supported SOC 2 and security audits by resolving the issues found.

• Helped establish the contract from a professional network built during an earlier Nike engagement.
• Designed and built a custom Adobe AEM integration with Nike's internal translation platform, providing internationalization for all global brand content, as team lead and contributor.
• Implemented feature flags for high-risk releases.
• Kept the Adobe AEM platform behind Nike.com's marketing content available to millions of site visitors across Nike, Converse, Hurley, and Jordan, with hundreds of authors publishing globally, as part of a small team with a QA engineer and a sysadmin: served content from cache through maintenance windows, added features, and participated in on-call incident response; worked directly with content authors on their issues.

• Consulting and engineering for government entities using Adobe AEM.

• Built full-stack solutions to serve Nike.com content and content authoring.
• Implemented a major data migration to reorganize all brand content for Nike.com.
• Advised outside teams on applications and web APIs.
• Debugged a multi-week rendering bug that several engineers had been unable to resolve: on one older Internet Explorer version, line breaks rendered as missing-glyph boxes. Isolated it to that browser and tested a line-break string against each font in the stack, which showed the in-house currency-symbol overlay font, first in the stack, had no newline glyph; fixed the font build to insert an empty one.
• Resolved an AEM scheduling failure for worldwide product launches: editors setting a 2:00am Beaverton-time launch on a daylight-saving transition day hit an error, because the AEM version's bundled tzdata could not be updated. Built a custom OSGi service, isolating a newer Java time library and tzdata from the rest of the system, to convert them to each launch's local time.
• Demonstrated concepts and solutions to stakeholders and teammates across technical backgrounds.

Open source Go library of convenience functions for BuntDB, an embeddable key-value database: creating data files and storing simple and JSON-encoded values.

• Written for the Teem LDAP/AD sync application and published as an MIT-licensed Go module; starred by the author of BuntDB.

A new joke every 12 to 24 hours.

• Docker container on Google Cloud Run with autoscaling and a Cloud Tasks queue scheduling the next joke at a randomized 12-to-24-hour interval; Go backend with chi routing, Templ server-side templating, and Firestore.
• Simple frontend: plain CSS with custom styles and vanilla JS.

Home Kubernetes cluster running k3s on bare-metal hardware.

• GitOps: ArgoCD reconciles all cluster state from Git, with SOPS-encrypted secrets decrypted only at sync time.
• SSO across every internal service via Authelia 2FA backed by an LLDAP directory, enforced at the Traefik ingress layer.
• Cloudflare Tunnel exposes only the public app with zero inbound ports open on the home network, while CoreDNS/ExternalDNS auto-register everything else for LAN-only access.
• 4-node topology on repurposed desktop hardware, with node scheduling constraints keeping heavy workloads off the weakest node; self-hosted Forgejo, Headlamp, and kube-prometheus-stack.