Thomas Butman

Founder & Engineer, PepAlert

Lisbon (remote) | 2026 – Now

• Built PepAlert end to end on my own, from first commit to a deployed product with sign-in and alerts in under a week: an ingestion pipeline that uses the Claude API to extract prices and lab results, with uncertain items sent to a review queue.
• Built a pricing engine and multi-vendor order optimizer; shipped alerts, Telegram and Discord bots, and paid tiers with Stripe; tested model choices against real data before switching.

Technologies: Next.js, TypeScript, SQLite, Drizzle, Claude API, Stripe

Relocation and family, Career break

Lisbon | 2025 – 2026

Started a family in Lisbon; built Chatlingo, Smart Shopping and hardware projects.

Contract Software Engineer, DigitalPay

Remote from Lisbon | 2024 – 2025

• Built an ACH payment flow that collects recipient bank and address details, as composable, embeddable React components that can be extended to new payment networks.
• Added single sign-on with social and enterprise identity providers alongside the existing password login.

Technologies: React, Okta/Auth0, Google Places API, Storybook

Senior Software Engineer, DigitalPay

San Francisco, CA | 2019 – 2024

• Owned frontend development for all core applications: customer-facing payment products, internal tools and sales demos, used by millions of recipients across 250+ payment options and processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.
• When the business pivoted from one-off government and airline payments to class-action settlement payouts, rewrote the consumer payout portal on my own initiative over five to six months of nights and weekends, demoing a working version before proposing it and piloting it alongside v1. A payout to about a million recipients then ran smoothly on v2.
• Made the portal configuration-driven: customer defaults with per-program, per-network, per-status and per-amount overrides stored in the database. Launching a program went from days of often-buggy work to ready to test within a morning.
• Contained an unrelated backend failure at that launch through configuration alone: disabled the affected payment option and showed recipients a notice with the expected fix time, with no deploy.
• Modeled the UI as a state machine mirroring backend payment statuses, and designed the API and configuration schema in lockstep with the CTO, who later rewrote the backend along the same lines.
• Originated many of the features I shipped, demoing them before they were requested and anticipating the payment methods and per-program customization that new settlements would need.
• Remained the sole frontend engineer as the team shrank from 22 people to 6, maintaining the core applications and shipping their frontend features.

Technologies: React, AWS, Storybook, Webpack

Software Engineer, Sipree

San Francisco, CA | 2016 – 2019

• Led development of the recipient portal, a payment flow whose layout, networks and steps are driven by JSON config from a REST API.
• Worked directly with the sales team to build configurable product demos, including image recognition with AWS Rekognition and Lambda.

Technologies: React, Redux, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Material-UI

Study Management Associate, Allergan

Irvine, CA | 2007 – 2015

• Automated bulk document imports with scripting, raising throughput from about 100 documents a day to 2,300.

Tilde (tbutman.com/tilde)

Open source · v1.2

• A free, open-source Android app that turns a phone into an NFC business card, and the Tilde Card, a 3D-printable business card to go with it. Tap phones or scan the code to share a full contact card, a website or WhatsApp, switching between them in one tap, with no account, nothing to install on the other phone and no internet permission on mine.

Technologies: Kotlin, Android NFC, Material 3, GitHub Actions, OpenSCAD, Python

Smart Shopping

Working v1 · runs locally

• A barcode-driven household shopping system: one authoritative backend, offline-first device clients and a full hardware simulator.

Technologies: TypeScript, Fastify, SQLite, React, Playwright