About

Tommy MacWilliam is an accomplished Engineering Manager currently leading Figma's Developer Platforms area. With over a decade of relevant experience, Tommy is responsible for the build systems, CI, and development environments, as well as the core backend architecture and application primitives like the async processing platform. He is a natural leader and is currently hiring for his team. Tommy's impressive background includes co-founding Serenade, the most powerful way to write code using natural speech. He built the first ML-powered speech-to-code engine of its kind, plugins for various developer tools, support for 15+ languages, a cross-platform application with OS accessibility hooks, and infrastructure that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent developers. He grew a team of 8 and raised $2.3m in funding, ultimately leading to the acquisition of Serenade by Figma in June 2022. Prior to Serenade, Tommy was the Head of Platform at Quora, where he managed engineers and engineering managers across two teams. He was responsible for setting org-wide strategy, goals, and roadmap and delivering results. He led a group of 20+ engineers, engineering managers, data scientists, designers, and product managers focused on developer productivity. His teams were responsible for tooling and frameworks for product engineers and designers, as well as systems and abstractions for machine learning engineers and data scientists. Tommy holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Harvard College. His technical expertise includes Senior Software Engineer, ML, Backend, infra, test, and Web. Tommy's LinkedIn summary is a reflection of his fun-loving personality and his ability to enjoy life while still delivering exceptional results. He is a highly sought-after leader and manager in the tech industry.