Tom Fay
Principal Software Engineer at Alianza, Inc.
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Fay is a Principal Software Engineer based in Edinburgh with 11 years of experience building resilient back-end systems and leading engineering teams at companies including Microsoft and Metaswitch. He combines hands-on development with technical leadership, having moved from L3 engineering and management into senior principal roles managing hybrid and cross-functional teams. Tom is an active open-source contributor to notable tools like cargo-edit and Syft, where he added dependency-management features and improved SBOM support for modern RPM formats, showing deep familiarity with package registries and software composition analysis. His academic background in mathematics and an MS with distinction in Operations Research informs a data-driven, systems-thinking approach to problem solving. Colleagues describe him as pragmatic and detail-oriented, able to turn complex compatibility and tooling challenges into reliable, test-covered solutions. He brings a mix of production engineering, security-aware supply-chain work, and mentoring experience to architect scalable, maintainable systems.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Operations Research, Distinction, Master of Science - MS, Operations Research, Distinction at The University of Edinburgh
Github Skills (18)
dependency-management10
tooling10
docker10
cargo10
toolbox10
sbom10
containerization10
dockers10
go10
rpm10
golang10
rust10
toolz10
cli10
testing9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
killercup/cargo-edit
Sep 2019 - Nov 2021
A utility for managing cargo dependencies from the command line.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 8 commits, 5 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the `cargo-edit` project by enhancing its functionality, particularly in managing dependencies. They implemented support for alternative registries and the `--to-lockfile` flag within the `cargo-upgrade` command, allowing users to upgrade dependencies to versions locked in the `Cargo.lock` file. The changes involved modifications to the core logic of dependency management, manifest handling, and registry interaction within the Rust codebase. Several tests were also created to ensure the added functionality worked as expected.
cratedependenciesrustcargocommand-line
anchore/syft
May 2022 - Aug 2022
CLI tool and library for generating a Software Bill of Materials from container images and filesystems
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 5 commits, 5 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to improving the project's ability to generate Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) by adding support for newer RPM database formats, including those used by distributions like Fedora, CBL-Mariner, and Amazon Linux 2022. Their work involved integrating the `go-rpmdb` library, which involved code changes to several files and integration tests. The user also implemented and tested a cataloger for binaries built with rust-audit, demonstrating an understanding of software composition analysis and build processes. Additionally, the user contributed to improving support for CBL-Mariner distroless images, enhancing the project's compatibility.
filesystemsspdxociclivulnerabilities
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.