Thomas Baker
Experience
Cofounder, CTO
August 2024
— May 2025
Upshift (YC F24)
- Founded a company that participated in Y Combinator, legendary startup accelerator with 1% acceptance rate. Successfully raised a seed round
- Sourced and closed a 6-figure customer deal
- Built five different products as the company pivoted, including an LLM-powered app that extracts findings from home inspection report PDFs. Used bleeding edge techniques for OCR and prompting
Engineering Lead, Architect
March 2022
— August 2024
Candid Health
- Led the integrations and onboarding team during critical scaling stage (series A→B) as the company onboarded dozens of new customers
- Built V2 of the claim submission and remit integrations, providing company-saving agility to submit claims when Change Healthcare went down during the 2024 ransomware attack
- Rewrote the claims processing rules engine to be vastly more reliable and customizable, including a no-code rule builder for customer users. Migrated hundreds of rules to the new product, delighting users and reclaiming countless hours of Candid employee time
Forward Deployed Engineer, Software Engineering Lead
July 2018
— March 2022
Palantir Technologies
- Played a key role in the successful capture of an $823 million contract. Wrote ~50 data integrations, maintained complex stacks with hundreds of microservices, and built a state-of-the-art AI pipeline for documents
- Invented a no-code data integration product so users could write integrations instead of Palantir engineers. Successfully migrated the 50 integrations to the new product
- Led a team of 8 engineers as the product was adopted into Palantir's core offering and became the data integration backbone of dozens of other deployments
- Assembled and led team that won the 2021 company-wide hackweek
Education
University of Virginia
August 2014
— May 2018
Bachelor in Computer Science, Physics (3.81 GPA)
Skills
Backend:
Node, Python, Java, SQL (Postgres / Oracle)
Frontend:
HTML / JSX, Javascript / Typescript, React / Next
AI:
LLMs, RAG, Prompt engineering, Agents
Devops:
AWS, GCP, Terraform, Docker, k8s, pnpm, Gradle, GitHub Actions