Tom Macdonald

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

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

Summary

Technology leader and digital infrastructure consultant with over 15 years of experience translating business strategy into scalable, commercially valuable products and platforms. Career spans hands-on engineering through CTO, leading engineering, architecture, and DevOps organizations in streaming, cloud-native, and distributed-systems environments. Modernizes development processes with AI-enabled workflows and agentic coding practices, and builds strong engineering cultures through data-driven decisions, firm governance of security, reliability, and technical debt, and the development of technical leaders.

Core Competencies

Strategic Leadership

  • • Technology Strategy & Vision
  • • Org Design, Hiring & Mentoring
  • • Agile & Delivery Transformation
  • • Product & Roadmap Ownership

Infrastructure & DevOps

  • • Kubernetes & Cloud Native
  • • Distributed Systems & Scalability
  • • Security, Reliability & Governance
  • • DevOps & Platform Engineering

AI & Development

  • • AI-Enabled Development & LLM Workflows
  • • Multimedia & Video Tech
  • • Full Stack Architecture
  • • M&A Technical Due Diligence

Experience

Digital Infrastructure Consultant

Vienna, Austria February 2025 - Current

DevOps and AI Consulting

  • Coach client engineering leaders on team topology, workflow design, and delivery acceleration.
  • Level up client teams on Kubernetes, domain-driven architecture, and agentic coding practices.
  • Introduce LLM-assisted development workflows and AI-powered tooling that boost engineering productivity.
  • Architect and deliver scalable, AI-ready platforms 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 engineering capacity efficiently across initiatives.
  • Agentic coding: Introduced LLM workflows and AI-powered development tools across the engineering organization, accelerating delivery.
  • Team leadership: Mentored emerging technical leaders and established outcome-based goal setting to resolve delivery blockers.
  • Innovation: Drove AI research and integration into the product roadmap.

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, enterprise-ready product platform.
  • Instituted metrics- and dashboard-driven decision making, replacing opinion with evidence.

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.
  • Delivered a scalable Web Player serving ~2B views per month by setting outcome-based goals across teams.
  • Implemented agile methodologies to maintain a predictable release cadence, accelerating product development cycles by 50%.
  • Owned recruiting and technical roadmap input, responsible for 90% of the team's best engineering hires.

Technical Advisor | Architect

Eldora.do, Switzerland June 2022 - April 2023

Web3 Metaverse — part-time advisory alongside Bitmovin role

  • 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 from ~20 GB to ~3 MB with a custom reverse proxy overhaul, balancing roadmap delivery with tech debt reduction.

Freelance Software Consultant

Self-employed 2012 - Present (alongside full-time roles)

  • 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