Tim Etler
Professional Experience
Vetted
Technical Co-founder & Architect, 2013–Present
I have been a technical co-founder of Vetted from the beginning of our company journey when we started as Slant, working out of a shed. I've been a foundational part of building up the technical product and team from the ground up. I have been fascinated with the web and have been creating things since before Javascript and CSS existed and have persistently tried to push the boundaries of what my team and I can achieve with web technology.
Technology & Architecture
- Architected and implemented our real-time streaming client facing API and SDK that coordinates backend service messages with the client query requests as well as the integration of the SDK with our client framework request management libraries.
- Designed an end to end query type system to ensure type safety between backend and frontend codebases with versioning systems for app and API compatibility and linters to maintain schema definitions as well as comprehensive generic types to reduce interface redundancy while maintaining full typing and hinting.
- Created our distributed messaging system for allowing backend services to communicate status message updates from multiple servers to the client facing API server and routing and correlating update messages back to the originating client query requests.
- Created new low level libraries to enable features that could not be achieved with readily available projects or technology.
- Identified and fixed incredibly tough to track down low level bugs in open source projects we use including Expo and Better-Auth.
- Built our local development tools, creating a Docker Compose project that allows setting up a containerized local development environment with dev server build targets, file watching, and environment variable setup. Created with developer ergonomics in mind, allowing setup flexibility, broad environment compatibility, and minimal setup, requiring only two simple script commands to run.
Team & Culture
- Built out our incredibly talented AI Product Engineering team starting with our first hire.
- Designed our technical interviews which have been very well received by candidates and have lead to great hires from both a technical and cultural standpoint with an incredibly high retention.
- Worked closely with team during design and architecture of key frameworks and infrastructural components, establishing input, buy-in, and understanding to ensure successful project handoffs for continued development by the team.
- Established our coding standards and best practices, encouraging thoughtful code review, comprehensive typing, use of tooling and linters to enforce coding style, and CI pipelines to ensure they are enforced.
- Promoted a culture of mentorship and high development standards through mutual respect, understanding, shared quality goals, and uncompromising code review while pragmatically prioritizing company needs to maintain steady development velocity.
- Encouraged ownership, learning, and growth in the team by allowing them to take on additional leadership responsibilities and providing detailed feedback on specifications and system designs.
Processes & Leadership
- Established our development project management processes, evaluating, choosing, and setting up our issue management and knowledgebase software.
- Defined how we communicate and align on project requirements. Designed our PRD, RFC, and spec workflows, our slack communication structure, our epic structure, and onboarded the team to follow it.
- Designed integrated development workflows such as automatically updating our stories based on PR statuses and connecting our code quality tooling with commits and merges.
- Led and coordinated complex projects involving collaboration between AI, backend, product, and design, providing clear communication of goals, approaches, specifications, schemas, requirements, blockers, and deliverables. Organized meetings and project documentation to facilitate project discussion, responsibilities, alignment, and timing.
- Encouraged experimentation and learning by organizing and supporting team members in our regular hackathons.
Technical Stack
Expo · React Native · React · Next.js · TypeScript · JavaScript · Vercel AI SDK · TanStack Query · Better-Auth · Node.js · Koa.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Rest APIs · Streaming HTTP · OpenAPI · Docker · Docker Compose · Kubernetes · Google Cloud Platform · Google Pub/Sub · GitHub Actions · Rudderstack · BigQuery
Slant
(now Vetted)
- Was the head of frontend responsible for the client-side pipeline, including performance, seo, build system, styles, interaction, monitoring, and usability.
- Developed various sub products and sub systems such as chrome extensions, amp pages, micro services, and API servers.
- Architected our isomorphic client-side and server-side page rendering stack using Node.js and Backbone.js with DOM view hydration.
- Built out our community based recommendation website with user submissions, editing, and search among other features with Express.js and PostgreSQL.
PBworks
Full-Stack Developer, 2011–2012
- Worked on the full-stack web app, using PHP, MySQL, prototype, and jQuery.
- Created new feature pages with frontend and backend implementation.
- Built an updated user list view to support progressively loading very large finite lists.
- Initiated our frontend migration to Backbone.js.
Yahoo!
Internal Development Engineer Intern, 2010
- Adopted and expanded utility of an internal project management webtool.
- Designed new UI elements and administrative features using PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and YUI.
UCSD Psychology Department
Website and Experiment Programmer, 2008–2010
- Created online psychology experiments powered by PHP and MySQL.
- Developed and designed a lab website with easy to use management tools for updating the site.
HILTI (Construction Tools)
Software Design Intern, 2008
- Developed and designed a prototype GUI for the next generation version of their anchor design software.
- The prototype application was built in Visual Studio using C#, and a Microsoft Ribbon style API.
- I used OpenGL to create a 3D design environment to show off CAD features.
- The resulting application they developed based on the prototype followed the GUI closely and went on to win design awards.
IGMA (UCSD Musical Analysis)
Software Programmer, 2007–2008
- Developed and designed a multiplayer Flash game designed to collect research data from player input.
- Programmed a socket server in Java which managed the games state and communicated with a Flash client using XML messages.
