Tom McKenzie

phone
0402 677 161 / (512) 633 0124
email
tom@chillidonut.com
web
tommckenzie.dev
location
Melbourne, Australia

Profile

Tom is a hands-on technical leader and engineer, happiest at the frontier of the web — building end-to-end, from first-steps to small teams and startups, through to scaling effective systems and healthy teams. Across 15+ years he's worked with clients and companies including Mr Yum, Nintendo, Mushroom Group, VicRoads, SportsBet and Specsavers. Currently he's focussed on building AI-native companies, and validating products at the AI product frontier.

As the first technical non-founder at Mr Yum, he was instrumental in the company's growth to a record-breaking Series A and ongoing international success. He holds a Bachelor of Information Technology (Computer Science and Software Development) from Deakin University and contributes to open source.

Employment History

Brainwaves

August 2025 — Present

Role
Technical Co-founder / CTO
Technology
  • TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers (globally distributed), D1, R2
  • SQLite sync + Y.js real-time collaboration
  • Multi-user collaborative + multi-agent sessions for strategic work
Responsibilities
  • End-to-end build-out of agentic platform for collaborative and multi-threaded sessions
  • Edge-first, distributed architecture providing balanced data sovereignty and performance guarantees.
  • Advanced multi-agent orchestration and dynamic workflows, for deep research, spreadsheet-based dataset processing, etc.
  • Front-line with enterprise customers considering AI adoption. Customer-facing demos, navigated security, privacy and procurement review.

MLAI

June 2025 — April 2026

Role
Committee Member, Head of Tech (volunteer)

Build Club

September 2024 — January 2025

Role
CTO
Responsibilities
  • Joined at seed to break ground on the platform still in use today: managed LMS with quizzes, micropost and achievements social media, events platform.
  • AI-first codebase, architected for self-healing when users experience or report bugs; strongly typed from database to screen.

Consulting & Advisory

March 2023 — September 2024

Focus
Consulting and development for various early-stage startups, including AI-based proofs of concept covering:
  • automated medical paper review
  • deep research orchestration
  • flexible and qualitative schema data analysis
  • hospitality-focussed review and social media aggregation

Mr Yum

January 2020 — February 2023

Date
April 2022 — February 2023
Role
VP Product/Engineering, Strategic Projects
Responsibilities
  • Negotiated and scoped strategic vendor work, including payments (optimising fee savings of >1% AU net revenue), and third-party integrations.
  • Balanced contractual obligations and partnerships with real product delivery across the leadership and executive group.
  • Stood up a new cross-functional team in Austin, USA, in tandem with Co-founder/Head of USA
  • Research and scope product work for regional success in both USA and UK regions
  • Work with product leadership on scoping, prioritisation, and operational processes
Date
January 2020 — April 2022
Role
Founding Engineer / Director of Engineering
Technology
  • React, Typescript, Next.js, GraphQL (Apollo Client, urql)
  • Nest.js, Node.js, Apollo Server, typeorm, type-graphql
  • Kubernetes, istio, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS
Responsibilities
  • A whole lot of individual contribution scaling the product from MVP to formidible world-class product
  • Working closely with founders and leadership to define and grow product over time
  • Leading the growth of Product & Engineering team of an 80-strong remote team
  • Introduced product process "just in time" while maintaining culture and a responsibility for lean development

Covidence

May 2019 — December 2019

Role
Lead Front End Engineer
Technology
  • React, Typescript, GraphQL, modern build toolchains
Responsibilities
  • Created design library by adapting existing design patterns and standardising new patterns using Styled Components
  • Scaled up an initial implementation of React components to application-scale, including GraphQL componentry and tooling

ActivePipe

March 2016 — April 2019

Role
Senior Developer (React Specialist)
Technology
  • React, Redux, CSS Modules
  • Webpack and Babel tooling, Typescript
  • Ruby on Rails, Go, Kubernetes
Responsibilities
  • Brought on (in contract capacity) to kickstart a greenfield React project, build foundational tooling and structure, and up-skill existing team.
  • As the Javascript ecosystem evolved, oversaw migration to more streamlined tooling (Create React App) and Typescript.
  • Responsible for building scalable, core business features such as the email editor and its associated rendering service.
  • Key driver of frontend component library, integration tests (Nightwatch, Cypress.io), and CI/CD pipelines and tooling.
  • Expanded role to include infrastructure and container orchestration management during Kubernetes migration, supported twelve-factor development, and helped implement scaling strategies.

CareerLounge

November 2014 — December 2015

Role
Head Engineer
Technology
  • Universal (SSR) React, Redux, Ruby on Rails
  • ES2015, Babel, modular SCSS
  • AWS, Codeship, Github
Responsibilities
  • Managed timelines and responsibilities of engineering team.
  • Architected client web application, API, and infrastructure, achieving speedy first-paint and delightful in-app experience.
  • Systems administration of Amazon Web Services (Beanstalk, EC2, CloudFront, S3, Route 53).
  • Developer experience across development environments, continuous integration, documentation, and engineering support.

Future Music Festival 2015

for Mushroom Creative, October 2014

Role
Developer (contract) - HTML/CSS/JS and Wordpress development
Deliverables
  • Heavily customised Wordpress build including custom city selector and numerous funky design elements.
  • Worked with other members of Mushroom Creative on design and infrastructure scaling.
  • Hundreds of thousands of unique hits on launch day without issue.

Sugar Mountain 2015

for Mushroom Creative, September 2014

Role
Sole Developer (contract) - HTML/CSS/JS and Wordpress development
Deliverables
  • Full scale Wordpress build with large video and responsive page elements.
  • Developed infrastructure to handle festival-sized site load.

iSelect Style Guide

iSelect - at icon.inc, September 2014

Role
Developer - HTML/CSS/JS
Deliverables
  • Front-end framework with base styles, component library, full page templates, and bespoke components.
  • Ground-up build with each aspect tailored or validated against business and engineering requirements or pain points.
  • Assisted in-house developers on maintaining, extending, and integrating the guide into multiple languages and frameworks.
  • Used across all vertical landing pages and sales funnels as part of wider rebranding strategy.

icon.inc

October 2013 — October 2014

Role
Senior Developer
Technology
  • HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
  • Responsive design
  • Objective-C on iOS
Responsibilities
  • Front-end development of responsive websites, including bespoke interaction elements.
  • Integration of templates with Laravel– and Drupal-based projects.
  • iOS and Android mobile development.
  • Implementing best practices and improving current procedures.

Accounts4Life

Accounts4Life - at Wave Digital, September 2013

Role
Designer and Developer (contract) - Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS/JS
Deliverables
  • Design interface templates, including interaction of complex but succinct account mapping system.
  • Development of both back-end and front-end including a range of bespoke components.
  • High-volume parsing of esoteric transaction files used by all major banks (as mandated by the RBA).

Wave Digital

August 2012 — September 2013

Role
Developer
Technology
  • HTML, CSS, JavaScript
  • Ruby on Rails and PHP
  • Cloud development on AWS and Heroku (incl. cloud scaling applications)
  • Linux (Ubuntu) server administration
Responsibilities
  • Development of Ruby on Rails projects with complex business rules, including parsing of esoteric file formats, pulling and pushing data from Facebook, Twitter, and other APIs.
  • Client-side front-end development based on internal and external designs, maintaining support with IE7 and up including responsive websites.
  • User interface design, incl. user experience analysis.
  • Management of client relationships, and some low-level project management.
  • iOS development of prototype iPhone applications.

Domy na Wzgorzu

for Domy na Wzgorzu, June 2011

Role
Developer (contract) - HTML / CSS / JS
Deliverables
  • Created custom front-end with a rich interface and many interactive elements.
  • Fully compatible with IE7+, FF4+ and Chrome.

Blissmedia

November 2010 — August 2012

Role
Web Developer
Technology
  • PHP 4+, Classic ASP, ASP.Net
  • MySQL and MSSQL
  • Microsoft Server 2008 and 2010 administration
Responsibilities
  • Development of internally designed front-ends using HTML, JS and CSS, maintaining support with IE6 and up.
  • Integration of front-ends with an internally-developed CMS application (FreshMint) and E-Commerce system (bCommerce).
  • Development of custom builds to client spec in Classic ASP involving extensive modification of FreshMint and bCommerce.
  • Worked within varied project teams, sometimes as lead developer coordinating teams of up to 4 people.
  • Created in-house tools to aid in project management budget overviews, and track time spent on project tickets (which halved the amount of time employees spent time logging).

Formal Education

Bachelor of Information Technology (Computer Science and Software Development)

2007 — 2010