Tom Macdonald

Email: tm@thomas-macdonald.com | Phone: +436641188771 | Website: www.thomas-macdonald.com | Location: Vienna, Austria

Summary

Results-oriented and visionary technology leader with over 15 years of experience in driving innovation and leading high-performance engineering teams.
Excels in strategic planning, team leading, hiring, and building robust technological infrastructures.
Passionate about using cutting-edge technologies to solve complex business challenges.

Experience

CTO

qibri GmbH, Vienna, Austria | April 2024 - current

Pre-seed startup CTO

  • Technical vision and strategy:
    • Sales strategy input
    • Product ideation
  • Product development:
    • Spearheaded AI integration
    • Usage monitoring and reports
    • Reestablished test and backup functionality
  • Team leadership:
    • Mentoring
    • Removing blockers, tie-breaking decisions
    • Testing discipline
  • Innovation:
    • AI research

Contract Development

with Bolldorf OG, Vienna, Austria | May 2024 - current

Custom development of an online tourism ecommerce application

Tech Lead

Bitmovin GmbH, Vienna, Austria | June 2022 - March 2024

Initiated, designed and built a stable, extensible and high-performance Web player

  • Based on internal metrics and my own market analysis, I realized the need for a complementary approach to Player Technology. I launched the project, led design and development, and worked in tandem with Product on getting it to market.
    See: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitmovin/player-web-x
  • Redesigned the licencing backend for scale

Engineering Manager

Bitmovin GmbH, Vienna, Austria | February 2019 - May 2022

Oversaw development of the HTML5 web player

  • Led a team of 15 engineers in cooperation with upper management, as well as the Product and Customer Success departments to maintain, develop and deliver a Web Player serving ~2B views per month.
  • Implemented agile methodologies, accelerating product development cycles by 50% and improving team collaboration.
  • Responsible for 90% of the best engineering hires in the team.
  • Responsible for 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
  • 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 and cross-technology team of 7 engineers of mixed experience
  • Supported a team of ~100 webmasters
  • Maintained and extended a number of helper services in a SOA layout
  • Dropped web server ram usage by 99.995% using a custom reverse proxy

Freelance Software Consultant 2012 -

Developed a number of software projects, mostly web facing, some mobile

Customer-oriented approach

Using innovation where appropriate to save costs

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

Université de Nantes, France | 2009

Skills

Writings

Player Web X

Eldora.do