Tommy Smith
Polyglot Engineer at Weaviate
Stone, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTommy Smith is a polyglot engineer and postdoctoral physicist with 5+ years building cloud-native, production-grade systems and developer SDKs. He is a principal maintainer of Weaviate’s TypeScript client, co-maintainer of the Python client, and contributor to core database features such as server-side gRPC, RBAC, replica movement, and batch ingestion for the popular open-source vector DB Weaviate. His background in theoretical and computational physics gives him a first-principles approach to engineering—favoring general, robust solutions over quick fixes—and shows up in his work on performant indexing, API design, and migration tooling. Previously he built diverse AI-heavy products at Brainpool AI, from AIaaS pipelines and recommendation engines to forecasting and image-augmentation services, often combining Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust. Based in Stone, UK, he blends deep academic rigor with pragmatic, cross-functional product delivery and a knack for turning complex research ideas into reliable software.
5 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
A-levels (AS), Maths; Further Maths; Physics; Chemistry; (Music), A*AAA(A), A-levels (AS), Maths; Further Maths; Physics; Chemistry; (Music), A*AAA(A) at Cheltenham CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at The University of Manchester
Romanian, English
Stackoverflow
301reputation
10kreached
6answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
back-end-development10
apidoc10
vector-database10
go10
api10
grpc10
database-management8
datepicker6
react6
google-cloud-sql6
sqlalchemy6
many-to-many6
python6
python-asyncio6
google-cloud-platform6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
weaviate/weaviate
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:299 reviews, 200 PRs, 613 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Tommy primarily focused on back-end development tasks within the Weaviate repository, contributing code changes related to database indexing, gRPC request parsing and handling, and API updates. They implemented functionality for managing and querying named vectors, handling and processing data through the API. Their work included improving existing functions, adding new ones and ensuring consistent data handling.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchsemantic-search-enginehnswfaultsimilarity-search
weaviate/typescript-client
Jun 2023 - Apr 2025
Official Weaviate TypeScript Client
Contributions:66 reviews, 171 PRs, 568 pushes in 1 year 9 months
generative-searchimage-searchsearch-enginesemantic-searchtypescript
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