Testimonials
I have worked with Tom on multiple occasions over the past two decades across different industries including mining, telecommunications and academia. Each time I've been confident that bringing Tom on board with his cross disciplinary knowledge, that is rare in both its breadth and depth, will benefit the organisation and add value. He works to deeply understand the context and constraints of a problem. His business skills, underpinning creativity and engineering talents will find truly innovative, absolutely fit for purpose solutions.
Tom’s outstanding communications skills allow him to speak with confidence and authority equally well to an office full of developers as to a boardroom full of executives. It is exceptionally difficult to find people of his calibre. There is little more I can say by way of recommendation than I have already sought him out for multiple roles over his career and hope to work with him again in the future.
Dr Eric Nettleton
Tom joined Cooltrax as our Engineering Manager in late 2018 and worked with us for several years, becoming our Head of Engineering as we grew. We thought the job would be split evenly between software development and people management but Tom viewed it differently. Instead of writing software he began to restructure our engineering processes, updated and replaced almost all of our IT solutions, and put a renewed focus on product quality. He then worked with the board to grow the engineering team in order to support the sales opportunities we had in the pipeline and made some great hires who had an immediate impact within our company. Amongst all that change Tom also developed a refined product strategy that would see us redesign our core hardware devices and restructure the software. He led the team to build open APIs that let customers extract and explore their own data which is complementing well with the core Cooltrax SaaS capability.
On the technical front Tom did much of the design and architecture work across many of our engineering initiatives: our API specifications, a database overhaul, lots of changes to our cloud infrastructure, and so on. He had trusted staff who provided the development effort on each of those, but I know they respected his technical abilities too and were appreciative of the guidance and mentoring he provided.
I worked closely with Tom at the start of his tenure, and then remotely for much of it given the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns we faced. He has an inherent ability to set a direction and then work towards it independently, and his professionalism in keeping our team aligned and delivering outcomes despite all the challenges was commendable. Tom left us to support his young family through a long period of home-learning and I respected that choice despite being very sad to lose him. I hope to work with Tom again in the future and heartily recommend him as an engineering leader and a strong general business contributor in a Management team environment.
Andrew Wrigglesworth, Managing Director, Cooltrax
Tom worked with us to perform an architectural review of our software platform and product streams during a period leading up to a change in Superchoice's ownership structure. He helped facilitate a series of conversations between myself, our CTO, and Chairman to consider changes to the technology roadmap for the future. I appreciated Tom's insight and approach to problems, his disciplined methods to evaluate costs and trade-offs, and his professionalism throughout these sometimes difficult negotiations. Tom was a pleasure to work with and I look forward to collaborating with him again.
Gordon Sparrow, CEO, Superchoice
Tom is a hard working engineer with the skills and experience to complete complex projects. He has demonstrated exceptional teamwork abilities, working with a range of people with different skill-sets and backgrounds to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. He is also highly dedicated, always putting in the required hours to complete projects.
Dr David Wood, Roboticist and CTO
I have had the pleasure of having Tom in our End 2 End team at Telstra and I highly recommend him for any type of role that he would like to get involved in. Tom has a very sturdy approach to resolving complex problems and thinks out-side the box. As an individual Tom is reliable and always provided us with positive outcomes. Tom is a great team player and his personal values include perseverance, honesty, great sense of humour. Tom is a great and valuable addition to any organisation that would request his professional services.
Steve Marceau, Agile Coach & Scrum Master, Telstra
I have known and worked with Tom for 10 yrs. In that time I have seen him communicate his passion and skills in mechatronics and robotics. I have also coordinated projects that Tom has been involved with and I have been impressed by his abilities to conceptualise problems, develop innovative solutions and to work constructively and creatively with colleagues to achieve highly regarded results.
John Currie, Innovation and Management Consultant