Thomas Harmon
Head Of Engineering at Helicone (YC W23)
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolThomas Harmon is a Head of Engineering based in San Francisco with 10 years of experience building high-performance backend systems and developer platforms. He leads Helicone’s open-source AI Gateway in Rust, designing resilient features like load balancing, rate limiting, caching, and real-time provider health monitoring while also implementing pay-as-you-go billing for LLM providers. Prior roles include building Kraken’s Rust-based web framework and API gateway, and driving major cost-saving migrations and developer-experience improvements at PowerAdvocate. A pragmatic systems engineer, he contributes to notable open-source projects such as ReadySet by modernizing SQL parsing with nom v5. He combines low-level Rust expertise with full-stack delivery—TypeScript, Next.js, Kubernetes, ClickHouse—and a track record of shipping production-grade infrastructure and observability. Outside work he maintains a personal site focused on veganism, reflecting an interest in practical lifestyle and technical clarity.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Punahou SchoolBachelor’s Degree Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Northeastern University
Github Skills (9)
nom10
rust10
text-parsing10
parsing10
backend9
sql9
mysql8
postgresql8
caching7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
readysettech/readyset
Dec 2019 - Feb 2020
Readyset is a MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer that sits in front of existing databases to speed up queries and horizontally scale read throughput. Under the hood, ReadySet caches the results of cached select statements and incrementally updates these results over time as the underlying data changes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on refactoring and updating the codebase to utilize nom v5 parsing functions. They made significant changes to several files (`common.rs`, `compound_select.rs`, `case.rs`, `insert.rs`, `set.rs`, `update.rs`, `order.rs`, `create.rs`, `join.rs`, `delete.rs`, and `parser.rs`) to modernize the parsing logic. Their work was centered around adapting the project to the new version of the parsing library.
streaming-datamysqlrustcachingsql
goodSyntax808/thomasharmon808.github.io
Nov 2017 - Jun 2022
Contributions:103 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years 7 months
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.