John Thornton
Principal Engineer at Stealth Startup
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Thornton is a Senior Staff Engineer with 18 years designing and shipping backend systems, currently scaling infrastructure at BILL from a Staff to Senior Staff role. He combines deep expertise in Elixir, Kubernetes, DevOps and statechart-driven survey/workflow engines with strong roots in Ruby, Smalltalk and data modeling/ETL for OLAP workloads. His career includes leading engineering and principal roles at fintech and payments companies (Divvy, Nav) and building survey engines early in his career, showing a long-standing focus on complex, rules-driven systems. Based in Salt Lake City, he blends hands-on implementation with architectural leadership, mentoring teams to operationalize resilient cloud-native services. A pragmatic polyglot, he often applies statechart patterns to tame workflow complexity—an approach that’s informed by two decades of building survey and monetization platforms.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Utah
Github Skills (64)
predicate10
smalltalk9
js9
ascii-art8
elixir8
backend8
homebrew8
ruby8
xml-serialization8
xml-parser7
css7
textmate7
rails-app7
user-experience7
code-editor7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
riddler/uxid
Jun 2020 - Dec 2020
User eXperience focused IDentifiers
Contributions:137 commits, 92 PRs, 87 pushes in 6 months
javafocusedidentifiersuser-experience
johnnyt/dotfiles
Oct 2019 - Feb 2025
💻macOS System Configuration with Fish, Package Control, VS Code, Repo management, Hammerspoon
Contributions:9 pushes, 2 branches in 5 years 4 months
repo-managementsystem-configurationvscodevs-codepackage-control
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