Thomas Davis

Full Stack Developer & AI Engineer

Cairns

TD

About

Software engineer with 20+ years building products, infrastructure, and open source software. Founder of JSON Resume and co-founder of cdnjs. Currently working across AI agents, programming languages, compilers, GPU computing, model training, and formal verification. I enjoy building complex systems from first principles.

Work Experience

Independent (contract & advisory)

2021-05-05 - Present

Principal Engineer — AI (contract)

Principal-level engineering across AI, product development, and full-stack architecture. Most recently led production AI capabilities for an HR-tech SaaS, from agentic features to the underlying services.

  • - Built production AI copilots with tool calling over customer data, response evaluation, and streaming interfaces.
  • - Developed autonomous agent workflows for generating reports, presentations, and PDFs from live business data.
  • - Shipped high-scale analytics and real-time collaboration systems, including server-side compute, caching, and concurrent-edit integrity testing.

Tokenized

2020-05-05 - 2021-05-05

Senior Javascript Developer

Built the frontend of an Electron-based Bitcoin wallet for issuing, managing, and trading digital tokens.

  • - Developed React and Redux interfaces for secure wallet operations.
  • - Implemented local key-management and transaction-signing workflows, keeping private keys on the user's device.

Blockbid

2018-03-01 - 2020-01-01

Senior Javascript Developer

Full-stack engineering and technical leadership for an Australian cryptocurrency exchange.

  • - Built trading interfaces and exchange services using React, Apollo, Node.js, and Rails.
  • - Integrated liquidity providers and optimized SQL queries across tens of millions of market records.
  • - Worked across infrastructure, product design, and deployment on Docker, Heroku, and GCP.

Listium

2016-01-01 - 2018-01-01

Developer

Developed a cross-platform React/Redux application for web, iOS, and Android using a shared application architecture.

  • - Built a PWA with React Native wrappers for mobile platforms.
  • - Worked with PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, AWS, Heroku, Fastly, and Cloudflare.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

2014-04-01 - 2016-01-01

Developer

Developed digital campaigning infrastructure and civic participation tools.

  • - Built a Ruby on Rails action centre for contacting elected representatives.
  • - Developed campaign tools and integrations that lowered barriers to public participation.

Earbits

2013-03-08 - 2015-01-09

CTO

Joined as a frontend engineer and became CTO, leading product engineering, infrastructure, and a small development team.

  • - Built a Backbone.js single-page application backed by Rails and MongoDB.
  • - Managed developers and designers and migrated infrastructure from Heroku to AWS.

Taskforce.is

2013-06-01 - 2016-01-01

Developer

Developed civic technology and online campaigns opposing mass surveillance.

  • - Helped build The Day We Fight Back and related campaigns.
  • - Campaigns generated 37 million banner views, 100,000 phone calls to Congress, 500,000 emails, and 250,000 signatures.

BackboneTutorials.com

2011-01-01 - 2014-01-01

Founder

Created a widely read educational resource for JavaScript and Backbone.js.

  • - Reached over two million unique visitors annually.
  • - Generated 25,000+ ebook downloads and 300,000+ YouTube views.

Ephox

2011-01-01 - 2012-06-01

Front-end Developer

Developed frontend applications and widgets for enterprise editing software, including API design, documentation, and UI/UX work.

    Volunteer

    MobTranslate

    2020-01-01 - Present

    Creator & Maintainer

    Open-source language revitalization platform for Aboriginal Australian languages, combining dictionaries, community recordings, translation, and speech technology.
    • - Built neural TTS and ASR pipelines for low-resource languages using VITS, wav2vec2, phonemic dictionaries, and fine-tuning.
    • - Developed language datasets, translation experiments, evaluation tools, and an Android keyboard.
    • - Designed consent-first, community-governed workflows where real speaker recordings take precedence over synthetic speech.

    Education

    The University of Queensland

    2008-02-12 - 2009-12-12
    Software Engineering (incomplete)

    Skills

    AI, Agents & Machine Learning:
    LLM Training & Inference
    AI Agents
    Agent Orchestration
    Model Context Protocol (MCP)
    Tool Calling
    OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini
    Vercel AI SDK
    RAG & Vector Search
    Embeddings & Reranking
    Evaluation & Benchmarking
    Synthetic Training Data
    Fine-tuning
    Autograd
    Tokenization
    Speech Models (TTS / ASR)
    Compilers, GPU & Formal Methods:
    Compiler Construction
    Programming Language Design
    Dependent Types
    Lean 4
    Formal Verification
    GPU Architecture
    GPU Machine Code Generation
    NVIDIA SM86 / SM90
    Vulkan
    SPIR-V
    CUDA-free GPU Computing
    FP8 / FP16 / BF16
    Multi-GPU Training
    NVLink
    ELF Executables
    x86-64 / AArch64
    C
    Rust
    Frontend:
    React
    Next.js
    TypeScript
    JavaScript
    HTML / CSS
    Tailwind CSS
    Styled Components
    Redux
    GraphQL / Apollo
    Electron
    Three.js
    Backbone.js
    Backend:
    Node.js
    Go
    Rust
    Python
    PHP / Laravel
    Ruby on Rails
    Bun
    Deno
    PostgreSQL
    MongoDB
    Redis
    GraphQL
    REST APIs
    WebSockets
    Server-Sent Events
    Cloud & DevOps:
    AWS
    Google Cloud Platform
    Cloudflare Workers
    Durable Objects
    Docker
    Kubernetes
    Vercel
    Railway
    Heroku
    GitHub Actions
    CI/CD
    Linux
    Serverless
    Architecture & Engineering:
    Distributed Systems
    System Design
    Event Sourcing
    Database Architecture
    Real-time Collaboration
    API & SDK Design
    Monorepos
    Turborepo
    High-performance Computing
    Concurrency & Data Integrity
    Knowledge Graphs
    CLI & Developer Tooling
    Open Source Maintenance
    Benchmarking & Testing

    Projects

    Alpha

    A dependently typed programming language and compiler for AI learning systems. Compiles model mathematics, training loops, host code, and GPU instructions into self-contained executables without conventional machine-learning runtimes.

    JSON Resume

    Founded the open standard for representing resumes as JSON. Now an ecosystem of schemas, themes, developer tools, AI job matching, and agent integrations.

    cdnjs

    Co-founded one of the web's largest open-source JavaScript and CSS content delivery networks, now operated with Cloudflare.

    Donto

    An evidence-first knowledge system for AI agents, built in Rust and PostgreSQL. Stores contradictory claims with provenance, bitemporal history, query-time reconciliation, and formal verification.

    llmtobinary

    An experimental computing platform where language models generate literal executable machine bytes rather than source code, which are validated and executed on a custom virtual computer.

    Bode

    Developing a general-purpose agent execution harness for persistent sessions across web, CLI, and local development environments.

    Prove2

    An experimental mathematical reasoning platform connecting ideas, Lean 4 formal proofs, theorem libraries, and AI agents.

    TPMJS

    Tool Package Manager for AI Agents. Discovers, validates, and exposes npm packages as tools through MCP, SDKs, and command-line interfaces.

    Blocks

    A semantic validation system for AI-generated code, using domain specifications to detect inconsistencies and implementation drift.

    Toiletpaper

    An adversarial research-paper replication engine that extracts scientific claims, constructs evidence graphs, runs independent checks, and records reproducibility verdicts.

    Omega

    An AI-powered Discord agent with 80+ tools, multi-database memory, code execution, and autonomous improvement workflows.

    llm-benchmark

    CLI for using language models to optimize functions, validate functional equivalence, and benchmark implementations across languages and providers.

    Awards

    Defender of the Internet

    2014-10-02

    Fight For The Future

    For my work against mass surveillance and building civic tools for digital democracy.

    Languages

    English — Native speaker

    Interests

    Programming Languages & Computer Science
    Compiler Design
    Formal Methods
    GPU Computing
    Experimental Computing
    Open Source
    Developer Tools
    Open Standards
    Community Infrastructure
    Languages & History
    Linguistics
    Language Revitalization
    Genealogy
    Historical Research
    Gardening
    Lazy Gardening
    Music
    Guitar
    Singing
    Dancing
    Books
    Reading
    Writing
    History
    Science Fiction

    References

    Joey Flores, Co-founder and CEO of Earbits, Inc.

    “Thomas was hired as a lead developer and, upon the leaving of our co-founder took over as CTO of Earbits. Thomas is, hands down, one of those A Players you hear of companies dying to hire. He is incredibly smart, not just at code but about everything from classical music to Chinese language and culture. Thomas is great to work with and, as a well established contributor to open source projects and several successful ventures, commands the respect of engineers at all levels. I would suggest doing anything you can to have him on your team.”

    Yotam Rosenbaum, SVP of Operations, Earbits, Inc.

    “I've had the great pleasure of working with Thomas for the past three years at Earbits, and on a few side projects. Two years ago our CTO left on a moment's notice, Thomas saved our company by quickly stepping up to fill this role. He has been with our company through thick and thin and made serious personal sacrifices in order to help the company during tough times. He is a phenomenal hacker and a true team player. Highly recommended!”

    Ryan Kirkman, Senior Software Engineer at Nerdwallet

    “Thomas is an extremely talented engineer with a very broad range of skills and experience. From being a thought leader in the front-end community via backbonetutorials.com and cdnjs.com, to designing and implementing the API for cdnjs.com, working with Thomas has been fantastic learning experience. Thomas is truly a full stack develop, and his work output is incredible. If there is any opportunity to work with Thomas, I take it. He is the definition of an A player.”