Tom Kirkpatrick
Chief Technology Officer at Strike
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Summary
🤩
RockstarTom Kirkpatrick is a CTO based in Barcelona with over two decades of engineering experience and 11+ years leading teams, currently steering Strike's engineering strategy and product delivery. He blends hands-on expertise across back-end systems and front-end UX—evidenced by contributions to the Lightning Network Daemon, Zap Wallet, and grpc-js—bringing both protocol-level improvements and polished React interfaces. Known for empowering high-performance teams, he focuses on shipping secure, scalable payments infrastructure and pragmatic developer tools. A pragmatic engineer-leader, Tom has improved core Lightning routing, enhanced gRPC TLS/proxy behavior, and refined wallet UX, showing a rare mix of cryptographic payments domain knowledge and UI craftsmanship.
11 years of coding experience
English, French, Spanish
Github Skills (29)
javascript10
tls1210
lightning-network10
ui-components10
http10
bitcoin10
proxy10
proxy-server10
styled-components10
bitcoins10
tls1310
cryptocurrency10
mtls10
go10
proxies10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
LN-Zap/zap-desktop
Mar 2018 - Feb 2022
Zap Wallet - Cross platform Lightning Network wallet focused on user experience and ease of use ⚡️
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:37 releases, 30 reviews, 4385 commits in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits primarily focused on front-end development tasks, with a significant emphasis on UI component implementation and styling. They made modifications to existing components such as modals, and dropdowns, as well as implemented new components like "ClippedText" and "InputLabel". The user demonstrated a strong proficiency in React and its related technologies, including styling with styled-components and integration with the Rebass UI library.
lightninglightning-network-walletuser-experiencewalletfocused
lightningnetwork/lnd
Oct 2018 - Apr 2021
Lightning Network Daemon ⚡️
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 8 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributes to the core Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) functionality, focusing on improving the queryroutes implementation and exposing configuration options for neutrino. Their work involves modifying gRPC and CLI implementations, introducing configuration options for user agent settings, and updating fee estimation features. They also addressed issues related to on-chain transaction management, enabling the ability to spend unconfirmed coins, alongside related refactoring efforts.
cryptographypaymentsprotocoldaemonlightning
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.