Thomas Thornton
Software Engineer at Slack
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Thornton is an infrastructure and distributed systems engineer with 11 years of experience building reliable back-end systems, currently at Slack in the Los Angeles area. He has deep hands-on experience in change-data-capture internals, contributing to Debezium’s core offsets contract and compatibility features, and a track record delivering scalable services at Yelp prior to Slack. His background spans machine learning for document extraction, mobile and VR app development, and robotics research, reflecting an ability to move between low-level systems work and applied ML. Thomas combines practical engineering—shipping production code and tests across large open-source projects—with a research-oriented curiosity evident from conference presentations and academic projects.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Double Major: Computer Science & Economics, Bachelor's Degree, Double Major: Computer Science & Economics at Colby CollegeBachelor’s Degree, Major: Computer Science, Minor: Mathematics, Senior, Bachelor’s Degree, Major: Computer Science, Minor: Mathematics, Senior at Pomona College
English
Github Skills (10)
debezium10
javas10
change-data-capture10
kafka-connect10
cdc10
apache-kafka10
java10
event-streaming10
database9
databases9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
debezium/debezium
Jan 2021 - Feb 2021
Change data capture for a variety of databases. Please log issues at https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 reviews, 4 commits, 21 PRs in 18 days
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the core functionality of Debezium, focusing on defining and implementing an Offsets contract. This included modifying existing interfaces, creating new classes (SourceRecordOffsets), and updating existing code to utilize the new contract. The changes span multiple files, including the engine, embedded engine builder and related test classes, indicating a focus on the internal workings and data flow within the Debezium framework, which is essential for the change data capture functionality. Further commits introduced new functionality like the `buildOffsets` method for backward compatibility.
kafka-connectapache-kafkadata-capturedatabasekafka-producer
twthorn/debezium-connector-vitess
Apr 2023 - Mar 2025
An incubating Debezium CDC connector for Vitess
Contributions:142 pushes, 62 branches in 1 year 11 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.