Thomas Fili
Principal Software Engineer at Cesium
Haverford Township, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Fili is a Principal Software Engineer with over two decades of experience and 11 years focused on large-scale 3D graphics and geospatial systems, currently leading platform work at Cesium. He specializes in C/C++ and a broad toolchain (Node.js, Qt, COM, MFC) to process and stream massive datasets—buildings, trees, and point clouds—into 3D Tiles and real-time rendering pipelines. A long-time contributor to Cesium and to the widely used COLLADA2GLTF converter, he has deep expertise in memory-safe back-end engineering and practical format conversions for high-performance visualization. Thomas blends systems-level engineering with full-stack touches (JavaScript KML handling and network link time support), and his work often surfaces in open-source fixes that improve stability for global-scale mapping. Trained at Drexel and Penn, he pairs academic grounding with production-hardened experience in aerospace and geospatial software.
11 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Drexel UniversityMSE Computer Science, MSE Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (14)
memory-management10
resium10
cesiumjs10
kml10
javascript10
c-language10
geospatial10
cprogramming-language10
gltf10
collada10
3d10
testing9
cmake9
git8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
CesiumGS/cesium
Oct 2016 - Jun 2021
An open-source JavaScript library for world-class 3D globes and maps :earth_americas:
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 8 reviews, 41 commits in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on enhancing the KML data source functionality within the Cesium library. Their contributions involved improving the handling of duplicate IDs, adding support for timespan and timestamp elements in network links and folders, and fixing KML test cases. These changes included code modifications in `KmlDataSource.js` and `KmlDataSourceSpec.js` demonstrating a focus on geospatial data processing and integration. Additionally, the user addressed issues and merged master into other branches, improving the stability and functionality of Cesium.
3d-globegltfjavascript-librarygeospatial3d-tiles
KhronosGroup/COLLADA2GLTF
Nov 2018 - Jul 2019
COLLADA to glTF converter
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 7 PRs, 26 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the `COLLADA2GLTF` converter by fixing memory management issues, enhancing the conversion process, and addressing bugs. They refactored code to correctly handle memory allocation and deallocation, eliminating potential memory leaks. The user also worked on improving the conversion of models, including lighting and double-sided models, and resolving issues related to references to non-existent entities, ensuring the output glTF files were accurate. Furthermore, they made CMake tweaks for improved build consistency across different environments.
fbxcolladagltfconverter
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.