Hi, my name is Thom Dixon.
I love making things that help people.
I’m a software engineer based in Seattle with over 8 years of professional experience and an additional 6 before that contributing to open source projects as a hobby.
My time at both small startups and large corporations has enabled me to become a proficient full-stack developer, but building distributed systems and infrastructure that focus on security and privacy are my specialties.
Industry Experience
- Senior Software Engineer, November 2020 - Present
Technologies used: Python, JavaScript
- Recently joined the Security Automation and Tooling team.
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Principal Member of Technical Staff, April 2018 - November 2020
Technologies used: Go, Python, Java, JavaScript
- Designed, implemented, and drove the adoption of an SSH Certificate-based solution for automated service accounts.
- Owned and maintained an authentication and authorization sidecar that permitted service owners to quickly meet and maintain security and compliance requirements.
- Key contributor to numerous internal security projects involving managing and enforcing access control policies for internal operators across a large, heterogeneous cloud environment.
- Uber
- Security Software Engineer, June 2016 - April 2018
Technologies used: Python, Go, JavaScript, Redis, MySQL
- Improved the performance of Uber’s secret storage service by reducing network utilization by 90%, reducing p95 response time by 66%, and increasing load capacity by 80x.
- Suggested and implemented significant architectural changes to Uber’s cloud document retention policy enforcement tool in order to improve efficiency and debugability.
- Implemented a FUSE filesystem client to Uber’s secret storage service to permit the consumption of file-based secrets across Uber’s infrastructure.
- Influence Mobile (Louder Rewards)
- Senior Software Engineer, September 2015 - May 2016
Technologies used: Ruby (on Rails), PostgreSQL, Java, JavaScript, React Native
- Principal engineer implementing a new ad platform with Ruby on Rails aiming to incentivize user engagement and re-engagement with customer mobile apps.
- A primary developer on the Louder Rewards mobile applications, utilizing React Native.
- Ultimate Software
- Security Software Engineer, May 2013 - September 2015
Technologies used: Python, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Angular, JavaScript
- Developed a plugin-based threat detection system with supporting microservices (in Python, using RabbitMQ for IPC) and a corresponding web front-end (with Angular).
- Designed and implemented a lightweight JWT-based authentication system and middleware that provide role-based security and service discovery.
- On the build and deployment team, I spearheaded the development of a web administration portal to be used by Ultimate’s operations teams for inventory and customer tracking.
Open Source Contributions
Check out my GitHub! Some recent contributions of note include: implementing a YubiKey OTP parser in Elixir, exposing access to HTTP headers in the Go OpenAPI runtime, and adding functional options to go-jwt. In the distant past, I fixed a bug for Android’s pull refresh in React Native, fixed a bug in the AES implementation of Google’s KeyCzar, and implemented five ciphers for Bouncy Castle.
Education
- University of Florida
- B.S. Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science, Spring 2011 - Spring 2013
- Graduated with a final overall GPA of 3.91