TW Walsh

Director of Engineering, VitalSource

• Lead three distributed engineering teams across five continents delivering Verba Connect, the system that turns a school’s course adoptions and enrollment roster into student-level digital access: auto-enrollment, entitlements, opt-outs, and the billing and reporting data behind the program. 2025 scale: roughly 900 institutions, 5.6 million students, 3,000 term catalogs, 325,000 course materials.
• Own the architecture and technical direction of a mature, high-integration Rails/React platform on GCP and Kubernetes: a deep domain model and a wide integration mesh of versioned REST APIs, asynchronous messaging and partner data feeds.
• Designed and built, hands-on, a production catalog-automation pipeline (Ruby on Rails) that replaced a manual onboarding process: ingesting adoption data, matching it to the catalog, and resolving publishers, pricing, distribution rights and fulfillment.
• Conceived and built Workbench, an org-wide AI engineering platform (Claude Code based) adopted across all twelve engineering teams plus product and QA. Nearly forty workflows embed agentic AI through the whole lifecycle: analyzing a spec for open questions, drafting and diagnosing tickets, solution design, implementation that hands its diff to an independent reviewer agent, PR review fanned out across parallel read-only agents, QA executed in a headless browser with the evidence posted to the ticket, deploy gating, a self-pacing post-deploy validation agent, root-cause analysis over read replicas and telemetry, post-mortems. Every write is a separate step a person approves; everything else runs dry by default. Primary author of some 800 commits over seven months, with nine other engineers contributing.
• Added retrieval-augmented context to Workbench (a Cloudflare Vectorize index of the engineering documentation across three repositories, idempotent nightly ingest, a semantic-search skill the agents use to find the right document) and a suite of read-only production data-integrity detectors and rollout gates, each written for a real incident class. Gave the internal talk on what seven months of running it taught us: give the model what it cannot know, pick the model that fits the risk, let it go look at real data, and do not take its word for it.

Founder, Fruitless Research

• A one-person audio software company, alongside the day job: a line of mixing and mastering plugins (AU, VST3, AAX; macOS and Windows) whose every readout is measured from the audio, so the user can check the numbers.
• Everything from DSP to storefront: C++ and JUCE with a shared measurement and regression suite; an Astro site and Cloudflare Workers for commerce, licensing and support; Paddle as merchant of record. Licenses are signed offline, with no account, server or telemetry in the plugin.
• Built the site’s “Ask a question” support assistant, a retrieval-augmented (RAG) system on Cloudflare: questions are embedded with Workers AI and matched against a Vectorize index that my own ingest builds from the manual, site, changelog and a licensing FAQ, and Claude answers through AI Gateway from those passages only, with sources. An evaluation set runs after every re-index, and when it doesn’t know it hands off to a person.
• Rebuilt that assistant on Databricks to compare the two platforms on one corpus and one evaluation set: the corpus in Unity Catalog, a Vector Search index with managed embeddings and hybrid search, a hosted model on Model Serving, the evaluation as MLflow scorers, deployed as an Asset Bundle job. Try it.
• Rewrote the plugins’ BS.1770 measurement core in Rust as a dependency-free library, a CLI and a WebAssembly module: K-weighting regenerated per sample rate, exact gating, EBU Tech 3342 loudness range, the Annex 2 true-peak detector. The EBU Tech 3341 and 3342 conformance signals are synthesised in the test suite and pass in CI. Try it · Code.
• Rebuilt it a third time on .NET and Azure: ASP.NET Core and EF Core on Postgres with pgvector and full-text search fused by reciprocal rank, the official Anthropic C# SDK, an idempotent nightly ingest service, OpenTelemetry; deployed from a Bicep template to Azure Container Apps with a managed identity for the registry and Azure OpenAI, and Postgres Flexible Server behind it. 30/30 on the shared evaluation set, scored over HTTP against the deployed service. Try it · Code.
• Put a Go, Python and C++ monorepo under Bazel on one protobuf schema with hermetic toolchains, a remote cache shared between laptop and CI through federated identity rather than keys, remote execution on hosted Linux executors, property-based tests in each language, and release binaries with SLSA provenance and a keyless Sigstore signature. A Go tool turns each build’s event stream into Datadog metrics through the Agent: wall time, cache hit ratio, per-test latency, benchmark drift. Code.
• Launched August 2026; the free plugin and the mailing to existing owners are the funnel, and the whole line is priced on the mastering record rather than on the plugin market’s defaults.

Senior Manager, Application Development, VitalSource

• Owned engineering for Bookshelf Online, a GCP/Kubernetes learning platform serving two billion web requests a month at a 99.99% SLA across all customer-facing services; the largest team in the organization, around thirty people including managers.

Manager, Application Development, VitalSource

• Led the team behind VitalSource’s Java-based ePub authoring platform through a significant modernization: retiring tech debt, migrating from AWS to GCP, and moving the team to a containerized development workflow.

Manager, Sales Engineering, VitalSource

• Built and led the sales-engineering team, bringing solution-selling discipline and technical credibility to pre-sales.

Executive Sales Engineer, VitalSource

Manager, Application Development, VitalSource

Application Developer, VitalSource

Application Developer, McGraw Hill

• Courseware platforms and content for higher education and K-12.

Recording, mastering, touring, Music, full time

• Pedro the Lion, Headphones, solo records, and the start of the mastering practice.

Application Developer, Art Technology Group (ATG)