Thomas Hopkins
Director Of Engineering at Getro- Claim this Profile
Click to upgrade to our gold package
for the full feature experience.
Topline Score
Bio
Carlos Muñoz
I had the pleasure of working under his leadership at Getro, where I was the Tech Lead, and I was consistently impressed by his calm and humble demeanor, even in the face of high-pressure situations. Thomas has a unique ability to keep a level head, which allowed him to make clear and thoughtful decisions that always put the team and the project first. His approach to leadership was never about taking credit for himself but rather about empowering his team and helping us grow personally and professionally. As my manager, Thomas was always supportive and understanding and provided valuable guidance and mentorship. He has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of software engineering and was able to provide valuable insights and suggestions that helped me improve my skills and grow as a professional. I do not doubt that Thomas would be a valuable asset to any team, and I highly recommend him for any engineering management role.
Catherine Connor
I worked with Thomas for 2 years at Getro. Thomas was the first engineering manager for the company and quickly evolved into a well-deserved Dr of Engineering position, establishing engineering best practices across 3 agile teams, each empowered to define their own ways of working. As a true servant leader, Thomas is a compassionate individual who cares deeply about the happiness and wellbeing of engineering while coaching them to be best at their craft. Thomas is not afraid to get into details to unblock work for engineers, and is comfortable engaging with users to answer technical questions. His sense of humor, calm and poised attitude, and can-do attitude quickly earned him the respect from the C level to individual contributors. Thomas was a quintessential addition at the time the company needed to grow its engineering team with key hires and establish strong engineering leadership to scale.
Carlos Muñoz
I had the pleasure of working under his leadership at Getro, where I was the Tech Lead, and I was consistently impressed by his calm and humble demeanor, even in the face of high-pressure situations. Thomas has a unique ability to keep a level head, which allowed him to make clear and thoughtful decisions that always put the team and the project first. His approach to leadership was never about taking credit for himself but rather about empowering his team and helping us grow personally and professionally. As my manager, Thomas was always supportive and understanding and provided valuable guidance and mentorship. He has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of software engineering and was able to provide valuable insights and suggestions that helped me improve my skills and grow as a professional. I do not doubt that Thomas would be a valuable asset to any team, and I highly recommend him for any engineering management role.
Catherine Connor
I worked with Thomas for 2 years at Getro. Thomas was the first engineering manager for the company and quickly evolved into a well-deserved Dr of Engineering position, establishing engineering best practices across 3 agile teams, each empowered to define their own ways of working. As a true servant leader, Thomas is a compassionate individual who cares deeply about the happiness and wellbeing of engineering while coaching them to be best at their craft. Thomas is not afraid to get into details to unblock work for engineers, and is comfortable engaging with users to answer technical questions. His sense of humor, calm and poised attitude, and can-do attitude quickly earned him the respect from the C level to individual contributors. Thomas was a quintessential addition at the time the company needed to grow its engineering team with key hires and establish strong engineering leadership to scale.
Carlos Muñoz
I had the pleasure of working under his leadership at Getro, where I was the Tech Lead, and I was consistently impressed by his calm and humble demeanor, even in the face of high-pressure situations. Thomas has a unique ability to keep a level head, which allowed him to make clear and thoughtful decisions that always put the team and the project first. His approach to leadership was never about taking credit for himself but rather about empowering his team and helping us grow personally and professionally. As my manager, Thomas was always supportive and understanding and provided valuable guidance and mentorship. He has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of software engineering and was able to provide valuable insights and suggestions that helped me improve my skills and grow as a professional. I do not doubt that Thomas would be a valuable asset to any team, and I highly recommend him for any engineering management role.
Catherine Connor
I worked with Thomas for 2 years at Getro. Thomas was the first engineering manager for the company and quickly evolved into a well-deserved Dr of Engineering position, establishing engineering best practices across 3 agile teams, each empowered to define their own ways of working. As a true servant leader, Thomas is a compassionate individual who cares deeply about the happiness and wellbeing of engineering while coaching them to be best at their craft. Thomas is not afraid to get into details to unblock work for engineers, and is comfortable engaging with users to answer technical questions. His sense of humor, calm and poised attitude, and can-do attitude quickly earned him the respect from the C level to individual contributors. Thomas was a quintessential addition at the time the company needed to grow its engineering team with key hires and establish strong engineering leadership to scale.
Carlos Muñoz
I had the pleasure of working under his leadership at Getro, where I was the Tech Lead, and I was consistently impressed by his calm and humble demeanor, even in the face of high-pressure situations. Thomas has a unique ability to keep a level head, which allowed him to make clear and thoughtful decisions that always put the team and the project first. His approach to leadership was never about taking credit for himself but rather about empowering his team and helping us grow personally and professionally. As my manager, Thomas was always supportive and understanding and provided valuable guidance and mentorship. He has a deep understanding of the technical aspects of software engineering and was able to provide valuable insights and suggestions that helped me improve my skills and grow as a professional. I do not doubt that Thomas would be a valuable asset to any team, and I highly recommend him for any engineering management role.
Catherine Connor
I worked with Thomas for 2 years at Getro. Thomas was the first engineering manager for the company and quickly evolved into a well-deserved Dr of Engineering position, establishing engineering best practices across 3 agile teams, each empowered to define their own ways of working. As a true servant leader, Thomas is a compassionate individual who cares deeply about the happiness and wellbeing of engineering while coaching them to be best at their craft. Thomas is not afraid to get into details to unblock work for engineers, and is comfortable engaging with users to answer technical questions. His sense of humor, calm and poised attitude, and can-do attitude quickly earned him the respect from the C level to individual contributors. Thomas was a quintessential addition at the time the company needed to grow its engineering team with key hires and establish strong engineering leadership to scale.
Experience
-
Getro
-
United States
-
Internet Publishing
-
1 - 100 Employee
-
Director Of Engineering
-
Sep 2021 - Present
I am accountable for the success of our engineering organisation as we scale. This includes technological and organisational strategy, hiring, performance and stability of our systems, career progression of engineers and the productivity of our cross functional squads.*Accomplishments*- Creating an AI/ML capability and our first AI backed features- Growing the engineering team from 4 to 10 permanent members (+ additional contractors)-- Inc the development of interview plans - Scaling our technical systems to accommodate ~7% MoM growth in traffic, with an Apdex score- Implementation of a cross-functional squad structure, championing each squad's autonomy to own their own goals and outcomes - Successfully executing a three track approach to concurrently resource:-- Servicing and scaling of existing technical systems,-- Iterative feature development for an established product with wide customer base and-- Discovery cycles within new markets and the development of new MVPs - Taking a data driven approach to improving team productivity (e.g. the reduction of PR cycle time from ~52hrs to consistently under 36hrs) mindfully taking each metric in its full context. - Overseeing a full system migration from Heroku to AWS and the migration of frontend applications from Angular to React/NextJS- The development and application of a detailed framework for engineering progression at Getro*Responsibilities*- Make decisions that help the team be optimally productive and team members be optimally happy - Provide the resources for engineers to upgrade themselves and hone their craft- Celebrate engineers for their craft- Attract, recruit and retain exceptional values-aligned engineering talent- Create and maintain the technology roadmap- Foster exceptional cross-functional collaboration- Help engineers follow best practices of customer-centric organisations- Be a catalyst for the values and the vision of the company amongst engineers Show less
-
-
Software Engineering Manager
-
Jul 2020 - Dec 2021
Responsibilities: - Manage timelines and capacity planning- Support team in keeping working agreements up-to-date and nurture accountability to these agreements- Work with engineers to define engineering best practices and encourage adherence to them- Remove obstacles to smooth the development process- Ensure engineers are working on the right priorities- Facilitate effective communication, collaboration and decision making within the team- Evolve process, where appropriate, to increase efficiency and enjoyment- Advocate for reliability and scalability projects. Make trade-offs to balance conflicting objectives between engineering, product and commercial functions- Challenge technical decisions to encourage creativity and improve quality- Communicate technical decisions, limitations and risks to non-technical stakeholders- Work with engineers to set progression plans and find opportunities to realise them- Own Scrum Master responsibilities- Ensure the health and happiness of team members- Attract and hire new engineering talent Show less
-
-
-
Conversocial, A Verint Company
-
United States
-
Software Development
-
1 - 100 Employee
-
Engineering Team Lead, Strategic & Integrations
-
Feb 2018 - May 2020
Responsibilities:• Lead engineer for strategic projects and integrations between the core Conversocial platform and third party CRMs e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud• Responsible for the development of the platform, performance and continual evolution of technical architecture and the professional development of team members• Working with product managers and design teams to understand the user and deliver engaging user experiences• Pre-sales client consultations and scoping• Jointly responsible for the hiring of engineers across all teams including into the CTO position• Implementation of processes to increase productivity, including moving to SCRUM• Organisation of and participation in on-call rota for incident response• Introduction of Engineering Standards documents and an RFC process for their creation and adoptionProjects:• Integration of our agent workspace with our newly acquired proprietary bot handover protocol• Agent Assist feature allowing agents to initiate and see the result of bot flows from within the agent workspace• Infrastructure for reusable and extensible integrations across the client base• Salesforce and Oracle Service Cloud CRM integrations• New reporting API for the Crowds platform (a community powered social customer service solution) and technical planning for a major project pivot• Clipboard feature for the Crowds platform allowing community moderators to create templated answers and product experts to search and insert these 'clippings' when replying to a question• Conversocial wide performance improvements, reducing average response times by over 50%Technologies:• Internal & customer facing REST APIs with Python and Django• Client side applications in JS ES6 with React and Redux• Message queueing and performant consumption• Data modelling in MySQL and MongoDB• Agile development methodologies: SCRUM; CI; TDD• Docker based local development• AWS infrastructure including ECS, S3, and SQS Show less
-
-
Engineering Team Lead, Crowds Platform
-
Aug 2017 - Feb 2018
-
-
Full Stack Engineer
-
Aug 2014 - Aug 2017
Responsibilities:• Full stack development: - Server-side internal and customer facing REST APIs with Python/Django - Client-side UI development with React and Flux - Sharded Solr cluster management - Data modeling with MongoDB - Message queueing with RabbitMQ• Mentoring of new developers• Triaging support tickets and fixing issues Projects:• Worked as part of a team to design, implement, test and maintain:• Resolution Management System for the creation, update and resolution of 'issues' associated with customer service conversations, including automated follow up with customer satisfaction surveys. • Tracking and visualisation of Resolution Management metrics. This involved the enqueueing of resolution events, a periodic task to performantly consume these events and import the data into our Solr database, and APIs to query and return the data in a format that powered visualisations in the UI.• Agent Dashboard - providing contact centre managers with a view into the real-time status and performance of specific agents and teams. This involved the implementation of an event based data model and leveraged Mongo's aggregation pipeline to construct complex queries that powered a dashboard UI with drill-down functionality.• Clipboard feature allowing contact centre managers to create templated responses and agents to search and insert these 'clippings' when replying to a customer.• Plug and play API to expose any Mongo collection to clients. Show less
-
-
-
Self Employed
-
Southampton, United Kingdom
-
Science and Mathematics Tutor
-
Oct 2009 - May 2014
-
-
-
McLaren Automotive Ltd
-
United Kingdom
-
Automotive
-
700 & Above Employee
-
Vehicle Software QA - Intern
-
Jun 2013 - Aug 2013
-
-
Education
-
2011 - 2014
University of Southampton
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Physics -
Ferndown Upper School
A Levels, Maths, Physics, Further Maths A*AA -
Ferndown Upper School
Community
