Resume

Tim Pile

Staff Platform Engineer · Founder, Determa · Bothell, WA

I bridge business strategy, product vision, and engineering execution. Fifteen years taking products from nothing to production, across product, platform, data, and AI systems.

Experience

DRINKS Staff Platform Engineer

Mar 2025 – present · Greater Seattle Area

First staff engineer at DRINKS, an e-commerce compliance company; the role was created around this kind of work. Own core platform architecture and technical design across the org.
Led the foundation of a new tax-calculation service onto Shopify's new tax platform: migrated the rate data off the legacy admin, stood up the calculation engine, and shipped the first end-to-end Shopify integration to production.
Led the migration off Heroku onto AWS with zero downtime, cutting monthly hosting cost for those workloads by more than 80%.

Determa Founder

Dec 2025 – present · Bothell, WA

Founded and built an AI-powered clinical documentation platform for dermatologists, solo, on GCP and Vertex AI, and took it to paying customers.
Real-time medical transcription, an LLM pipeline for clinical note generation, HIPAA compliance end to end, and an Apple Watch recording pipeline, all in one monorepo.
Cut LLM inference costs by 86% through model selection and prompt architecture changes, verified against an eval system I built to confirm output quality held.
Nearly all of the code is written by coding agents, working inside guardrails I designed for a HIPAA product.

Hone

Apr 2019 – Oct 2024

Staff Engineer Feb 2023 – Oct 2024

Advised senior leadership on technical solutions; prototyped experimental features in R&D, including an internal AI prototype.
Architected and implemented the data warehouse and ETL pipelines, and trained the BI team to own them with dbt core.
Owned systems integrations for Sales, Customer Success, and Operations.
Member of the security and compliance team that carried the company through SOC 2 Type II; mentored senior engineers.

Lead Engineer Feb 2021 – Feb 2023

Hired the company's CTO and Director of Engineering, and grew engineering into three teams in about six months, owning hiring, onboarding, and team processes.
Led the effort that delivered SOC 2 Type I certification.
Architected systems and mentored engineers.

Senior Software Engineer Apr 2019 – Feb 2021 · Remote

Joined as the fifth employee and went into the Series A as the only engineer, owning the application, the infrastructure, and the data.
Built the platform from the ground up with Python/Django and React on Google Cloud and Postgres, owning key features front to back.

Automated Insights Software Engineer

Apr 2018 – Mar 2019 · Durham, NC

Built end-to-end data integrations on the Wordsmith natural-language API for managed-services clients such as Yahoo! Sports, enabling over 70 million generated fantasy football recaps. AWS Lambda, Ruby/Rails, Python.

Gritchat Technical Founder

Sep 2017 – Apr 2018

Founded and built an automated text-messaging platform that sends daily reminders and encouragement toward personal health goals. Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Twilio, Heroku.

Earlier experience

2011 – 2017

Business intelligence and data engineering across consulting and in-house roles: ETL, data-warehouse design, and reporting for Marketing, Finance, and Sales. Microsoft, iContact, Slalom Consulting, Univar, and Decisive Data.

Skills

Architecture & leadership: System & platform architecture, technical leadership & mentorship, hiring & team building, cross-org collaboration
Languages: Python, Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, SQL (T-SQL)
Backend: Django, Rails, Postgres, REST APIs, event-driven messaging
Frontend & mobile: React, iOS, watchOS, SwiftUI
Cloud & infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, AWS Lambda
Data: Data warehousing, ETL pipelines, dbt, SQL Server, Vertica
AI: Agentic AI development, LLM pipelines, Vertex AI, LLM evals, prompt architecture
Compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA

Education

Northwest University

BA, 2008