Tyler Smalley
Principal Software Engineer II at Elastic
Fox Island, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarTyler Smalley is a Principal Software Engineer II with 14 years of experience building developer platforms, backend systems, and high-impact tooling for teams at scale. He has driven major productivity wins—most notably leading a Jenkins-to-BuildKite CI migration that halved build time and cut infrastructure costs by 70% for a 3.7M LOC TypeScript codebase at Elastic. As a former Tailscale engineer he shipped networking-focused features like secure local-server sharing, TCP forwarding, and a VSCode extension that simplifies remote access, demonstrating deep back-end and networking chops. Tyler combines hands-on implementation (CI/CD, snapshot testing, build automation) with product-minded leadership—running experiments to optimize user activation and developer workflows. He moves fluidly between founding startups and leading large engineering orgs, with a practical knack for tooling that scales across 100+ engineers. Based on his open-source contributions to prominent projects like Kibana and Tailscale, he prefers solving hard infrastructure problems that quietly unlock developer velocity.
14 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
301reputation
30kreached
15answers
0questions
Github Skills (31)
back-end-development10
bash10
networking10
cicd10
tailscale10
automation10
go10
tcp10
automations10
devops10
buildkite9
vpn9
dockers9
wireguard9
docker9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/kibana
Feb 2016 - Dec 2022
Your window into the Elastic Stack
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:961 reviews, 1161 commits, 1663 PRs in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tyler primarily focused on improving the CI/CD pipelines and build processes within the Kibana repository. They removed verbose flags from various scripts and modified several build scripts related to testing, plugins, and dependencies. The user also contributed to updating APM configuration and setting up the test environment for ES snapshots. The contributions indicate a focus on streamlining testing and release workflows.
elasticdashboardskibanaobservabilitywindow
tailscale/tailscale
Aug 2023 - Oct 2024
The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 68 reviews, 32 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Tyler primarily contributed to the development and refinement of the `tailscale serve` and `funnel` features, which involve sharing local servers securely. Their work includes merging code paths for serving and funneling, introducing background mode functionality, and refactoring existing code for improved maintainability. The user also focused on implementing TCP forwarding and integrating with the Tailscale IPN, demonstrating strong back-end and networking skills.
secureprivacysecurityvpnwireguard
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