Two-time founder-CTO and engineering executive. Today I'm VP of Engineering at CYPHER Learning, where I own technology strategy, architecture direction, and the engineering organization behind a multi-tenant SaaS platform serving ~2M monthly active users and 700+ enterprise customers.
Former NASA-funded scientist, educator, founder, and author. I help teams find the structure inside complexity — then turn it into software, organizations, and products that hold together under load.
Leading 30 engineers across 6 countries — engineering, DevOps, QA, and integrations — on a Rails platform that never pauses for deploys. A few things that have come out of it:
- 99.9% uptime held steady and load time cut 60% as traffic and customer base grew
- $1.2M/yr in cloud spend removed while improving resilience and operational visibility
- Delivery throughput doubled by restructuring a flat org into subsystem-owned teams with clear ownership
- SOC 2, GDPR, and EAA compliance achieved alongside roadmap and risk reporting to PE board stakeholders
Scaling engineering systems — teams, platforms, delivery practices, and technical decision-making for organizations moving from founder-led or legacy complexity into durable execution.
AI and product architecture — practical AI-enabled products and workflows that solve real customer problems instead of chasing demos. My bet: proximity to customer data is the moat, not the model.
Platform modernization — untangling aging systems, controlling replica lag, clarifying architecture, and helping teams ship with more confidence.
Technical leadership — the structures engineers actually need: clear ownership, better feedback loops, stronger delivery habits, and a healthier culture.
A non-linear path where each phase trained something I still use leading engineering.
- Scientist — Ph.D.; NASA Graduate Research Fellow. Glaciology and remote sensing from Greenland to the Peruvian Andes. Selected as a NASA grant evaluator, judging competing national research proposals. Modeling systems too big to see at once → forensic root-cause analysis. Deciding where scarce funding goes → executive prioritization.
- Educator & founder — Created Tennessee's first Meteorology degree program; founded Boca Code; taught 2,500+ students and mentored hundreds of engineers. → building, leveling, and growing teams.
- Author — Out of the Fish Tank, reconstructing a lost family history into a book a general reader finishes in a weekend. → explaining complex systems to non-experts and stakeholders.
- Your Customers Don't Want Your AI Assistant (2026) — why proximity to data, not models, is the defensible edge
- Commit — an AI companion app for engineering managers (in development)
- The Least-Used but Most-Powerful Debugging Tool for Engineers (2025)
- 7 Reasons Why Most Products Fail (2024)
More at medium.com/@toddhalbert.
Good systems are not just code. They are agreements, feedback loops, constraints, tools, defaults, and stories that help people make better decisions under pressure.
The work is rarely to build more. It's usually to find the structure that was already trying to emerge — and make it strong enough to carry the next stage.
Most of my production work lives in private and client repositories. What's public here leans toward teaching, experiments, and personal projects.