Tilo Sloboda
Staff Software Engineer at Gusto
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTilo Sloboda is a Staff Software Engineer with 23 years of experience building backend-centric systems, currently based in San Jose and driving architecture and partnership engineering across fintech and consumer products. He is a seasoned Ruby on Rails expert, founding engineer at Chime’s Credit Builder and creator of popular open-source gems like smarter_csv, and he brings a pragmatic focus on reliability, observability, and scalable APIs. His background spans startups and large-scale platforms (Tesla, Roku), where he led transitions to modern datastores and telemetry-driven features, and he has a history of shipping mission-critical releases on tight timelines. Tilo blends deep academic training in neural-network speech recognition from KIT/CMU with hands-on product leadership and is actively exploring Elixir/Phoenix for next-generation services. Fluent in English and German, he often combines entrepreneurial instincts with thoughtful engineering trade-offs to unlock new growth channels.
23 years of coding experience
33 years of employment as a software developer
MS PhD Candidate Computer Science, MS PhD Candidate Computer Science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)Computer Science, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
English, German
Stackoverflow
33,532reputation
4.8mreached
503answers
22questions
unix
top-5%
rubygems
top-5%
ruby
top-1%
multiprocessing
top-5%
sh
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-1%
Github Skills (35)
csv-parse10
nosql10
package-development10
json-api10
hashmap10
ruby10
csv-parsing10
macos10
mongodb10
ruby-on-rails10
database10
rubygems9
testing9
unix9
filesystem9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
tilo/smarter_csv
Jul 2012 - Jan 2023
Ruby Gem for convenient reading and writing of CSV files. It has intelligent defaults, and auto-discovery of column and row separators. It imports CSV Files as Array(s) of Hashes, suitable for direct processing with ActiveRecord, kicking-off batch jobs with Sidekiq, parallel processing, or oploading data to S3. Writing CSV Files is equally easy.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 reviews, 400 commits, 167 PRs in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Tilo primarily focused on the SmarterCSV Ruby gem's internal logic. Their contributions involved bug fixes, such as correctly parsing quoted fields, and adding new features like the ability to specify a column separator. The user also refactored existing functionality to improve the user experience.
csvarrayruby-gemunusualcsv-files
JsonApiClient/json_api_client
Aug 2021 - Sep 2021
Build client libraries compliant with specification defined by jsonapi.org
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 21 days
Contributions summary:Tilo primarily focused on improving the functionality and robustness of the JSON API client library. Their contributions included refactoring code using `HashWithIndifferentAccess`, adding "bang" methods for creating and updating resources to handle potential errors, and writing corresponding tests. The user also updated the existing code and removed debugging statements (`pry`), indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability.
jsonapijsonapiclientdefinedcompliantspecification
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