Preston Thompson
Founding Engineer at Useful
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPreston Thompson is a founding engineer and seasoned software developer with 12 years of experience building cloud-native systems, data infrastructure, and product-facing backend services from startup to scale. Based in Austin, he led Braze’s move to Kubernetes, introduced Terraform and GitOps practices, and built their initial Kafka-based streaming platform and real-time Snowflake integrations. He combines hands-on implementation—designing deployment and canary systems and shipping core product features like Braze Canvas—with a strong focus on developer experience and operational clarity. Comfortable across the full software lifecycle, Preston pairs deep engineering craft with an eye for pragmatic automation that reduces human error in complex multi-cloud environments. An MIT CS graduate, he brings both research-minded problem solving and production-hardened delivery to early-stage product engineering.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDu Pont Manual High School
Github Skills (28)
deprecated9
client-library8
ruby-client8
charts7
apache-kafka6
helm6
kafka6
ruby6
kubernetes6
kafka-consumer5
apache5
kafka-producer5
librdkafka4
package-manager3
appboy2
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
prestonwrthompson/ruby-kafka
Jan 2017 - Apr 2017
Contributions:7 PRs, 5 pushes, 3 branches in 2 months
apache-kafkaclient-libraryruby-clientrubyapache
avogel/thompson_nfa
May 2014 - May 2014
Contributions:19 commits in 2 days
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.