Tom Zhou, Founding Engineer

Tom Zhou

✨ Founding Engineer ✨

We're very excited for Tom Zhou to be joining Pylon as a founding engineer after nearly 5 years at Samsara. At Samsara, Tom was known as "The Database Team" where he helped do the hard work of scaling Samara's backend systems and platform.

Tom will be bringing his expertise in data modeling and designing systems to help us ship more data driven features 🚀

Why did you join Pylon?

The team and the market. I've worked with Advith, Jesse, and Alex in the past and know how quickly they both ship extremely quick and have a high quality bar. Pylon is also solving an obvious problem with a wedge into a huge market. The market tailwinds of conversational AI, the rapid adoption of Slack/Teams/etc. as customer collaboration platforms, and stagnating incumbents mean Pylon has a chance to disrupt the market and the team to execute on that vision. I'm excited to bring my skills in setting up scalable distributed systems and data modeling to help Pylon move faster and ship better product.

You most recently worked on platform engineering. WTF is that?

Platform engineering is about building tools and workflows to enable teams (in Pylon's case people 😅) to quickly push out new products by leveraging shared abstractions and infrastructure. Pylon is too early for true platform engineering, but I'm hoping to bring that energy as we need to extend and scale our product offerings and iterate quickly.

I heard you like video games, what have you been playing?

I love the problem solving and decision making involved in video games (and turns out its applicable in my day-to-day). Gaming is also a great way to connect with friends and accomplish something with a team effort. Currently I'm raiding in Guild Wars 2 and playing through Baldur's Gate 3.