About

Tom Gilmour is a seasoned tech industry professional with over 25 years of relevant experience. He is currently working part-time as an Instructor at Interview Kickstart where he coaches tech industry professionals on interview preparation for software engineering and management roles at tech giants. His activities include teaching classes and performing mock interviews with cohorts. Tom is a creative individual who enjoys solving problems and building great products with talented engineers. His passion is to create a work environment that is fun, engaging, and challenging. He is a huge fan of Agile development methodologies and open source. Tom has a strong professional background, having worked for top-tier companies such as LinkedIn and PayPal. At LinkedIn, he managed the Test Experience team, which provided developer services and solutions for test scheduling and analytics. He led efforts to remove technical debt and transition from QA-centric tools to more developer-friendly tooling. Tom was also very active in hiring committees and performing interviews. He led efforts to improve craftsmanship across product teams by creating a support group for developers who were interested in testing practices. At PayPal, Tom managed a team that developed test tools and infrastructure based on Selenium Webdriver. He migrated PayPal quality engineers off of legacy/proprietary testing technologies, which reduced regression testing time by over 90%. He influenced the culture at PayPal to embrace open-source standards and tools and instituted a community contribution model within PayPal so engineers from a variety of teams could contribute to their code base. Tom participated in the roll-out of Agile adoption within PayPal from an Engineering Practices and Tools perspective. He managed PayPal internal bug metrics and reporting solutions and delivered monthly quality updates to PayPal's CTO. Tom holds a MA in Education from the University of San Francisco, a Teaching Credential in English from San Francisco State University, and a BA in English from the University of California. His tech stack includes test, Senior Software Engineer, qa, infra, and Selenium.