Tom Duffield
Founding Engineer at Zenith Health
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCloud Infrastructure and Automation Engineering
Tom Duffield is a human-centric, systems-minded founding engineer with 13 years of experience building and scaling developer tooling, CI/CD, and automation across startups and enterprise teams. He has led release engineering and security-anchored platform efforts at Chef and CircleCI, pioneered “release process as code” with Expeditor, and drove a move to multi-region Kubernetes and GitOps practices. As an engineering manager at Datavant he built a scalable Python processing framework for large-scale health data and transformed deployments from monthly to daily through TDD and feature flagging. A prolific open-source contributor, Tom’s work spans packaging and build tooling (omnibus, Habitat), CI/CD stacks (Buildkite elastic agents), and configuration automation (Chef cookbooks), with practical Windows and macOS cross-platform experience. Based in Minneapolis, he now applies that blend of hands-on engineering, automation-first thinking, and mentorship as a founding engineer at Zenith Health. Notably, he focuses on eliminating human toil—building tools that make teams faster, safer, and less frustrated.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors of Science; B.S Computer Science, Bachelors of Science; B.S Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (76)
package-management10
testing10
windows10
rspec10
terraform10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
ci-cd-pipeline10
build-automation10
dockerfile10
update-site10
rake10
web-development10
live-update10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
chef/omnibus-software
Feb 2016 - Sep 2021
Open Source Software for use in Omnibus built packages
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Build/Release Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Build/Release EngineerContributions:120 reviews, 95 commits, 92 PRs in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily focused on maintaining and improving the build process and related infrastructure for the `omnibus-software` repository. They updated build dependencies, such as CMake, Git, and Go, and modified build configurations for various software packages. The user also made significant contributions to the continuous integration pipeline, implementing Docker-based compilation tests and improving the build verification process. The user frequently updated build scripts and configurations for Windows builds as well.
omnibusopen-source-software
chef-boneyard/chef-dk
Oct 2016 - Aug 2019
DEPRECATED: A streamlined development and deployment workflow for Chef Infra platform.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:146 commits, 127 PRs, 142 pushes in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily focused on improving the ChefDK project's development and release workflow. They implemented and updated rake tasks to manage version bumping, changelog generation, and release announcements. They also made changes to CI/CD configuration files, including updating dependency management and the Dockerfile. These updates streamlined the build and release process, and incorporated best practices.
continuous-deploymentcontinuous-deliverydeploymentinfrachef
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.