Tim S.
CTO at Distill
Mountain View, California
Overview
Work Experience
CTO
2024 - Current
Working on building amazing people + company search. We're hiring!
Exploring Ideas
2022 - 2024
Exploring various startup ideas (see my blog for details: https://timsu.org)
Co-Founder / CTO
2017 - 2022
Tandem (YC S19) is a virtual office for distributed teams backed by Y Combinator and a16z. See who's around, talk and collaborate in one click. I led a team of 15 building real-time distributed backend in Elixir, high-performance clients built on shared code in Typescript, React, Electron and React Native, media servers using WebRTC / Go. We helped our users spend over 2 million hours talking to their teammates over the first few years of the pandemic.
Director, Search and Mobile Products
2013 - 2017
Engineering director for new products in Search and Conversational Assistance. I led teams building conversational bots for Yahoo News, Weather, and Finance (1M DAU), mobile development for Yahoo Answers Now, and more, creating a fast-paced product discovery process exploring opportunities for AI-driven assistance. Our team also designed and managed a cross-platform content rendering framework for Android, iOS and web. I spent half of my time on product and half on engineering (mostly Scala). Previously, engineering manager for Yahoo Aviate, Messenger, and Groups, providing cross-functional leadership, creating efficient engineering processes, building high-functioning teams and solving technical challenges.
Yahoo is a technology and media company that serves users through its portfolio of digital platforms, products, and services.
Raised $6,800,000.00 from Visa, SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital and Reuters Venture Capital.
Co-Founder / CTO
2010 - 2013
Created Astrid, the collaborative task manager for Android, iOS, and web, a product loved by over 5 million worldwide. Provided leadership in all stages of the product lifecycle, including shaping the vision, designing the architecture, UI / UX, technical development, support, and ops. Astrid was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. I led development for Android & iOS clients, Javascript frontend & Ruby backend, developing scalable and reusable libraries for making software development and testing easy. We open-sourced several components built in-house, including a database management layer, dependency injection, AAC encoding, load testing, and custom A/B testing and analytics infrastructure for running rapid client and server-side experiments that continued to be used at Yahoo post-acquisition.
Software Engineer, Palantir Finance
2008 - 2010
Led a team to build Palantir Finance's deployment, monitoring and test automation efforts, including performance monitoring and tuning, automated jobs, installation configuration management, systems monitoring, and logging in a distributed environment. I developed reusable components for capturing vital statistics for JVM applications. I also managed a 10,000-line ant system, where I built distributed integration testing and other fun release engineering things.
Palantir Technologies is a software company that develops data analytics and data integration software solutions.
Raised $3,027,970,015.00 from ARK Investment Management and ARK Investment Management.
Undergraduate Research Assistant, STAR Lab
2005 - 2008
Designed software and hardware for embedded devices designed for long-term deployments in extreme environments, including hand-held frequency scanning and visualization, soft real-time scheduling system for embedded Linux, satellite file transfer system, and more, using C and Python on FPGA, ARM7, and AVR microprocessors.