Thomas Kosmas
Founding Software Engineer at Firecrawl
Greece
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Kosmas is a founding software engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance, scalable systems from the ground up. Based in Greece, he co-founded and engineered an automated retail checkout platform that handled thousands of concurrent users and ran on a stack of Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, React, Kubernetes and hybrid on-prem/cloud infrastructure. He now leads backend and DevOps work at Firecrawl, improving web crawling and LLM-ready data extraction with advanced scraping methods (chrome-cdp, tlsclient) and robust TLS and signal handling. An active contributor to open-source networking tooling, he enhanced apify/proxy-chain with connection management, custom DNS, and IPv4/IPv6 flexibility—practical changes that improve real-world proxy reliability. Thomas pairs low-level network and deployment expertise with product-focused engineering, often tackling latency, caching, and ISP-level network tuning to squeeze durable performance out of complex systems.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Technical University of Athens
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
proxy-server10
webscraping10
networking10
go10
dns10
crawler10
nodejs10
api-design9
apim9
api9
typescripts8
typescript-types8
typescript8
devops8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
mendableai/firecrawl
Jun 2024 - Apr 2025
🔥 Turn entire websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. Scrape, crawl and extract with a single API.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:27 reviews, 9 PRs, 19 pushes in 9 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on improving the firecrawl project's backend functionality and deployment. Their work included restructuring the codebase to support chrome-cdp and other scraping methods like tlsclient, and they also updated parameters for platform.openai.com. The user also made changes to the system's configuration, including updating dependencies and configuring the handling of signals and TLS verification in the crawl and robots.txt scraping processes. Additional work included the integration of Iframe support, showing a focus on improving the overall scraping capabilities of the project.
aiai-scrapingcrawlerdatahtml-to-markdown
apify/proxy-chain
Dec 2021 - May 2022
Node.js implementation of a proxy server (think Squid) with support for SSL, authentication and upstream proxy chaining.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 5 commits, 5 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the core functionality of the proxy server, adding features such as the ability to close proxy connections by ID and implementing custom DNS lookup capabilities. They also added the `family` option to the server and forwarding logic, enhancing network configuration flexibility. Furthermore, they made a minor code cleanup to remove unused properties, improving the codebase maintainability.
javascript-libraryproxy-serversslproxyupstream-proxy
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