CV

Tom Piaggio

Engineering leader and founder. Built and shipped AI systems at every layer: a real-time CCTV analytics platform serving ~200 cameras per server, the largest single pipeline ever run through Google's Vision API, and an agentic browser-testing product sold to banks and scale-ups. Twice founding CTO; ex-Google L5.

Experience

Autonoma · Co-founder & CTO

San Francisco · Jan 2024 - present · Bessemer-backed; angels include Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel) and Matías Woloski (CTO, Auth0) · github.com/autonoma-ai/autonoma (open source) · Full write-up

Agentic end-to-end testing: an autonomous browser agent runs a product's real user flows on every PR and reports failures with video, logs, screenshots, and code-level evidence from an actual execution.

  • Led all engineering, hiring, and product roadmap for a 9-engineer team; set monthly technical objectives directly from business targets.
  • Designed the browsing agent from scratch. Navigation paths are derived from source code rather than inferred by the model, so it runs on small models: median cost $0.50 per PR, versus $5-15 for a typical LLM code review, which reports opinions on the diff rather than evidence from running it.
  • Took the product from zero to paying customers as four technical founders with no sales team: peaked at ~$550K ARR, up to $50K ACV. Weekly regression pipeline at 98% accuracy for a major Argentine bank's digital brand; deployed at fintechs and scale-ups including Superhuman and Mercor. Named best AI startup for innovation and impact on the financial ecosystem at AIFI-25, Buenos Aires, September 2025.
  • Built the growth engine with AI-generated, experiment-driven content and no prior marketing experience: 0 to 5.9M search impressions and 68.8K clicks in 12 months (peak month 2.06M / 24K), driving ~1,400 signups/month.
  • Recruited a team that includes engineers who have compiled models to hand-tuned x86 assembly for inference performance; ran ~100 interviews at Autonoma on top of ~100 at Google.

Google · Senior Software Engineer (L5), AI & Data

Buenos Aires · Apr 2022 - Jan 2024 · Full write-up

Embedded with Fortune 500 customers on model best practices and production ML deployments.

  • Reddit: designed and ran the largest single pipeline in Vision API history: 350M images in a two-week Dataflow/Beam backfill; Google provisioned dedicated capacity for the load. Engagement grew ~5x from the original scope. Built the downstream IAB taxonomy classifier: USE embeddings + KMeans cluster features, 37 per-category forests with swept F1 thresholds, served on Vertex AI.
  • McDonald's: designed distributed data gathering and training across a restaurant fleet: a local model per site, a MiNiFi data path that projected out PII before egress and queued what it could not send, and automatic collection and evaluation of every classification.
  • Mercado Libre: migrated thousands of tables from Teradata to BigQuery.
  • Government intelligence agency: trained a T5 translation model inside an air-gapped environment.
  • Created the org's AI learning path for Googlers; grew to ~500 members worldwide. Awarded Initiatives Champion.
  • Conducted ~100 technical interviews for L4-L5 ML and software roles.

Metro Smart Cities · Co-founder & CTO

Buenos Aires · Apr 2019 - Apr 2022 · Full write-up

Won a public tender for an airport-scale CCTV analytics system against multinational incumbents (EXA and others) by proposing an AI-based architecture where competitors bid legacy systems. Delivered in one year.

  • ~400 fisheye cameras plus three 30MP bullet cameras (~200 cameras per server), sub-second latency, air-gapped, on two nodes.
  • One camera to N viewport streams via a grab/retrieve split, so ingestion scaled with cameras and decode with demand. 24 services, 88 CPU, 133 GB, 2 nodes.
  • Spun out of the university AI lab below.

Universidad Austral · Founder, AI Laboratory

Buenos Aires · Feb 2018 - May 2019 · Full write-up

Founded one of the first university AI labs in Argentina; ran a paper-reading group when little material existed locally. Research project with a hospital on real-time multi-camera tracking mapped to an abstract 3D space, with batch queries over object journeys: analytics for people flow, akin to product analytics for physical spaces.

Education

Ingeniería Informática, Universidad Austral, 2015-2020 (attended; left before completing the degree)

UChicago Polsky - Transform AI Accelerator, 2024

Work authorization

O-1 visa holder. A new employer files a new O-1 petition; existing evidence carries over and premium processing is 15 business days.

Writing

tompiagg.io, including 18 Months of Code, Gone (why we deleted the first product) and How to properly do max parallelism in TypeScript