Thomas Davis

Full Stack Developer & AI Engineer

Cairns

TD

About

Full stack developer with 15+ years building products at startups and in open source — founder of JSON Resume, co-founder of cdnjs. These days I build agentic systems end to end: tool-calling copilots with LLM-as-judge gates, autonomous document pipelines on the Claude Agent SDK, a bitemporal knowledge substrate in Rust with Lean-verified invariants, and neural TTS/ASR for Aboriginal language revitalization. Also trained a GPT from scratch in TypeScript and Vulkan just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I ship fast and let user feedback steer.

Work Experience

Independent (contract & advisory)

2021-05-05 - Present

Principal Engineer — AI (contract)

Principal-level contract engineering, most recently owning the AI capability of an HR-tech SaaS end to end: the agentic layer of the product — an in-app copilot with tool-calling over live customer data, autonomous document-generation pipelines, and the server-side compute services underneath — while shipping across the full stack (PHP/GraphQL, React, Go gateway, edge services).

  • - Built an in-app AI copilot: multi-provider tool-calling agent (Anthropic + OpenAI via Vercel AI SDK) with data-query and mutation tools, an LLM-as-judge quality gate scoring every response on 8 dimensions, and SSE keep-alive for long agent streams
  • - Designed an autonomous report pipeline — one model plans the document, Claude Agent SDK runs write it against live data, a second agent pass compiles branded slide decks via a 90+ layout PPTX compiler with chart rasterization and LaTeX PDF output, agents running in a parallel containerized fleet
  • - Moved heavy analytics server-side (Bun + Hono behind a Go gateway): pure-function ports oracle-verified for numeric parity with the client engine, event-keyed Redis caching, validated at 20k+ entity scale
  • - AI data enrichment: ingested a ~32-table public occupational dataset, LLM-classified it into customer data structures, and built persona-driven simulation commands generating realistic test data at scale
  • - Shipped a standalone real-time collaborative app on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects — WebSocket presence, optimistic updates with server reconciliation, embedded AI assistant with client-side tool execution
  • - Hunted down multi-user concurrent-edit data loss with a purpose-built integrity harness: truly-parallel mutation racing, event-chain fork detection, contract tests driving real client reducers against the live API

Tokenized

2020-05-05 - 2021-05-05

Senior Javascript Developer

Tokenized is a Bitcoin wallet for issuing, managing and trading digital tokens. I built the frontend, shipped as an Electron app. The hard part: keys never leave the user's machine, so all transaction and contract signing happens locally — which meant getting key management and security right in the UI layer.

  • - React
  • - Redux
  • - SCSS
  • - Product

Blockbid

2018-03-01 - 2020-01-01

Senior Javascript Developer

Blockbid is an Australian crypto currency exchange. I started off on the frontend but eventually became tech lead and worked on every moving piece of the exchange. I really enjoyed working with liquidity providers and connecting their platforms to help us achieve liquid markets.

  • - React, Apollo, Styled Components
  • - Node.js / Rails
  • - Docker / Heroku / GCP
  • - Used Figma for design and UX work
  • - Optimizing markets with tens of millions of rows using SQL.

Listium

2016-01-01 - 2018-01-01

Developer

Built a large React/Redux application that runs everywhere — web, iOS and Android — as a PWA wrapped in a thin React Native shell. One codebase, every platform.

  • - Worked with Postgres, Redis and Dynamodb for storage.
  • - Hosted on a mixture of Heroku Apps and EC2 servers.
  • - Caching by Fastly and Cloudflare
  • - Hybrid app supported on all platforms

Electronic Frontier Foundation

2014-04-01 - 2016-01-01

Developer

Hired to take EFF's campaigning to the next level by building an action centre in Ruby on Rails. The action centre is built around some large open source tools that lower the barrier to entry when contacting congress.

  • - Developed new tools for contacting congress
  • - Brainstormed campaign ideas to raise maximum awareness about issues
  • - Lots of social networking integration

Earbits

2013-03-08 - 2015-01-09

CTO

Started off as a front end developer but took on the role of CTO in early 2013. The application frontend is built with Javascript and organized as a single page application that talks to a collection of Rails web servers which are connected to MongoDB.

  • - Managed a small team of developers and designers
  • - Built the entire frontend application with Backbone.js
  • - Transferred all of the infrastructure from Heroku to AWS

Taskforce.is

2013-06-01 - 2016-01-01

Developer

Worked on many politically charged campaigns against mass surveillance. Not only technically challenging work but also a lot of networking and getting my hands dirty with politics. Our biggest campaign was "The Day We Fight Back."

  • - Generated 37,000,000 banner views
  • - 100,000 phone calls to congress
  • - 500,000 emails
  • - 250,000 signatures

BackboneTutorials.com

2011-01-01 - 2014-01-01

Founder

I write tutorials and blog post regarding the popular Javascript framework Backbone.js. The tutorials cover a range of topics regarding front end development aimed at beginners, experts and anyone in between.

  • - Over two million unique visitors a year
  • - 25,000+ ebook downloads
  • - 300,000+ Youtube views

Ephox

2011-01-01 - 2012-06-01

Front-end Developer

Ephox is a worldwide company who is heavily involved with the development of TinyMce and enterprise editors. My primary role included building front-end widgets and applications. Worked on a major product using Backbone.js as a base. Heavily involved in UI/UX design and wire-framing. Also spend a lot of time designing API specifications and documentation.

    Volunteer

    MobTranslate

    2020-01-01 - Present

    Creator & Maintainer

    Open-source language revitalization platform for Aboriginal Australian languages — dictionaries for dozens of languages, community voice recording, and a full speech/ML stack built with the community, not just for it.
    • - Neural TTS pipeline: MMS-TTS (VITS) driven through a grammar-grounded orthography bridge that maps Kuku Yalanji spelling onto a same-family Pama-Nyungan donor voice (per Patz's reference grammar), per-word phonemic IPA for 2,679 dictionary words, deterministic seeded synthesis with full provenance, and a per-language model registry
    • - ASR for low-resource speech: wav2vec2/Omnilingual CTC fine-tuning pipeline with reproducible dataset builds, serverless training runs, and benchmark harnesses
    • - LLM translation fine-tunes with research-grade evaluation: lexical censuses, prompt ablations, dose curves, failure taxonomies, and curriculum replay datasets across Kuku Yalanji and Mi'gmaq
    • - Native Android keyboard (IME), community recording infrastructure where real speaker audio always outranks synthesis, and sentence-corpus pipelines that turn recordings into training manifests
    • - CARE-aligned governance: synthetic voices are explicitly flagged as scaffolds, donor voices are borrowed until a community licenses its own, and per-speaker (elder) models require explicit, revocable consent

    Education

    The University of Queensland

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

    Skills

    AI & LLMs:
    Vercel AI SDK
    OpenAI API
    Anthropic API
    Google Gemini
    Structured Outputs
    Tool Calling
    Embeddings / Vector Search
    RAG Pipelines
    LLM Reranking & Evals
    AI Agents
    Model Context Protocol (MCP)
    Claude Code Skills
    Prompt Engineering
    LLM Training (from scratch)
    Autograd / Tensor Operations
    TTS/ASR Fine-tuning (VITS, wav2vec2)
    LLM-as-Judge Pipelines
    Frontend:
    React
    Next.js
    TypeScript
    JavaScript
    HTML / JSX
    Tailwind CSS
    Styled Components
    Redux
    Apollo / GraphQL
    Electron
    Three.js
    Backbone.js
    Backend:
    Node.js
    Go
    Rust
    Python
    Ruby on Rails
    PostgreSQL
    MongoDB
    Redis
    Supabase
    REST APIs
    WebSockets
    Deno
    Cloud & DevOps:
    Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    Kubernetes
    AWS
    Docker
    Vercel
    Railway
    Heroku
    GitHub Actions
    CI/CD Pipelines
    Serverless
    Cloudflare
    Architecture & Tooling:
    Monorepos (Turborepo)
    System Design
    API Design
    Microservices
    Real-time Systems (Pusher / Yjs)
    CLI Tools
    npm Package Publishing
    Open Source Maintenance
    Formal Verification (Lean 4)
    Low-Level & GPU:
    C
    Vulkan
    SPIR-V Shader Generation
    GPU Compute
    Mixed Precision (FP16)

    Projects

    JSON Resume

    JSON Resume is the open standard for resumes as JSON. I founded it in 2014 and still run it. What started as a schema is now an ecosystem: a registry that renders any resume in 52 themes, AI job matching that embeds your resume and scores it against live Hacker News hiring posts, an in-browser editor, an MCP server that updates your resume while you code, and a Claude Code skill that interviews you and hunts for jobs on your behalf. The whole thing lives in one open source monorepo.

    Donto

    An evidence-first knowledge substrate for LLM-scale extraction: a bitemporal, paraconsistent claim store (Rust + Postgres) that keeps contradictory claims forever, anchors every claim to character-level source spans, and re-ranks by corroboration on an E0-E5 epistemic ladder instead of deleting on conflict.

    TPMJS

    The Tool Package Manager for AI Agents. An open-source registry and execution platform that automatically discovers, validates, and runs npm packages as AI agent tools via MCP, SDK, or CLI.

    Omega

    Self-evolving AI Discord bot with 80+ specialized tools, multi-database architecture, and autonomous development capabilities. Built with Vercel AI SDK, Discord.js, and Next.js.

    Alpha

    From-scratch GPT training and inference system built in TypeScript with a hand-written C Vulkan addon for GPU compute. No PyTorch or TensorFlow — custom tensor backend, autograd, tokenizers, training loop, and inference engine.

    Blocks

    AI coding validator with semantic guardrails. A development-time validator that lets AI agents write code freely while maintaining consistency through domain semantics and multi-layer validation.

    Toiletpaper

    Adversarial scientific-paper replication engine. Extracts a paper's claims into a statement graph, compiles them into typed replication units — metric recomputes, dataset integrity checks, equation checks, simulations — executes them, and emits verdicts: reproduced, contradicted, or fragile.

    llm-benchmark

    CLI that generates LLM-optimized variants of your functions, validates them for functional equivalence, and benchmarks them across providers. Published on npm as llm-benchmark.

    cdnjs

    Co-founded cdnjs, a free CDN for the JavaScript libraries Google's CDN didn't carry. Community-moderated and open source; we partnered with Cloudflare, who now runs the infrastructure.

    Awards

    Defender of the Internet

    2014-10-02

    Fight For The Future

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

    Languages

    English — Native speaker

    Interests

    Gardening
    Lazy Gardening
    Music
    Guitar
    Singing
    Dancing
    Books
    Reading
    Writing
    History
    Open Source
    All of it

    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.”