Tom Macdonald

Email: tm@thomas-macdonald.com | Phone: +436641188771

Website: www.thomas-macdonald.com | Location: Vienna, Austria

Summary

Results-oriented Technology Leader and Digital Infrastructure Consultant with over 15 years of experience building highly scalable streaming solutions and modern architecture. Proven track record of scaling cross-functional teams and acting as a strategic coach to develop technical leaders, fostering aligned autonomy and setting outcome-based goals. Passionate about boosting engineering productivity by driving the adoption of AI-powered development tools and agentic coding practices. Brings strong data awareness and a firm delivery mindset to successfully balance roadmap execution with functional excellence.

Core Competencies

Strategic Leadership

  • • Technical Strategy & Vision
  • • Team Building & Mentoring
  • • Agile & Scrum Transformation
  • • Product Innovation & Roadmap

Infrastructure & DevOps

  • • Kubernetes & Cloud Native
  • • High-Performance Architecture
  • • System Scalability & Security
  • • DevOps Modernization

AI & Development

  • • Multimedia & Video Tech
  • • AI Integration & LLM Workflows
  • • Full Stack Architecture
  • • Technical Due Diligence

Experience

Digital Infrastructure Consultant

Vienna, Austria February 2025 - Current

DevOps and AI Consulting

  • Coach and advise client engineering leaders on team management, structuring workflows to foster aligned autonomy and accelerate delivery.
  • Empowering engineering teams by leveling up their skills in Kubernetes, mapping domains, and fostering agentic coding practices.
  • Implementing LLM workflows that drive the adoption of AI-powered development tools to boost engineering productivity and innovation.
  • Architecting and building scalable, AI-ready solutions tailored to business customers.

CTO

qibri GmbH, Vienna, Austria April 2024 - January 2025

Pre-seed startup CTO

  • Technical vision and strategy: Led product ideation and structured teams to manage engineering capacity efficiently across initiatives.
  • Fostered agentic coding practices: Implemented LLM workflows driving the adoption of AI-powered development tools, boosting engineering productivity and innovation.
  • Team leadership: Mentored emerging technical leaders, fostering aligned autonomy and setting outcome-based goals to resolve blockers.
  • Innovation: AI research and integration.

Tech Lead

Bitmovin GmbH, Vienna, Austria June 2022 - March 2024

Architected scalable video tech infrastructure built for business customers

  • Realized the need for a complementary approach to Player Technology based on market analysis. Launched the project, led design and development, and worked with Product to bring it to market.
    See: npmjs.com/package/@bitmovin/player-web-x
  • Redesigned the licensing backend as a scalable product solution built for enterprise business customers.
  • Championed strong data awareness, utilizing metrics and dashboards to make decisions from evidence rather than opinions

Engineering Manager

Bitmovin GmbH, Vienna, Austria February 2019 - May 2022

Oversaw development of the HTML5 web player

  • Structured teams and mentored other leaders, managing engineering capacity to support up to 15 engineers across 2 teams.
  • Fostered aligned autonomy by setting outcome-based goals, delivering a scalable Web Player serving ~2B views per month.
  • Implemented agile methodologies to maintain a predictable release cadence, accelerating product development cycles by 50%.
  • Responsible for 90% of the best engineering hires in the team and technical roadmap input.

Technical Advisor | Architect

Eldora.do, Switzerland June 2022 - April 2023

Web3 Metaverse

  • Defined technical strategy with the executive team.
  • Educated contributors on agile methodologies.
  • Managed overall system architecture and technology selection.

Lead Engineer

Yelster GmbH, Vienna, Austria Dec 2016 - Jan 2019

Maintained and enhanced one of the largest Wordpress installations worldwide (~7k websites)

  • Led a diverse, cross-technology team with a strong delivery mindset, demonstrating that perfect is the enemy of done.
  • Supported a team of ~100 webmasters and maintained helper services in a scalable SOA layout.
  • Dropped web server RAM usage by 99.995% with a custom reverse proxy overhaul, balancing roadmap delivery with tech debt reduction.

Freelance Software Consultant

Self-employed 2012 - Present

  • Developed multiple software projects (web and mobile).
  • Customer-oriented approach using innovation to save costs.

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

Université de Nantes, France 2009

Writings