Laura Thomson

SVP of Engineering

Lumos

Dec 2025 - Current (9 months)

Senior Vice President Of Engineering

Fastly

Dec 2021 - Nov 2025 (4 years)

- Led Fastly Engineering organization, ~360 engineers responsible for designing, building, and operating all Fastly products. - Grew Fastly Engineering and technology from a single product line (CDN) to support four product lines: Network Services, Security, Edge Compute, and Observability - Created and developed Resilience Engineering and Release Engineering disciplines to support 700% increase in network capacity, multiple products on the same platform, and 3x revenue over five years with no increase in the raw number of incidents, and a decrease in the raw number of severe incidents. - Led teams to build and ship new products including, for example, WAF, Bot Management, DDoS Management, Edge Compute, KV storage, Object Storage, AI Accele

Board Trustee

Internet Society

Aug 2020 - Jul 2026 (6 years)

Appointed by IETF to serve as a Trustee on the Board of the Internet Society for the term 2020-2023, and reappointed for 2023-2026. Served as Treasurer 2021-2025.

Vice President Of Engineering, Platform

Fastly

Mar 2020 - Dec 2021 (1 year 10 months)

Senior Director Of Engineering, Firefox Engineering Operations

Mozilla

Feb 2017 - Mar 2020 (3 years 2 months)

Lead team of ~120 engineers responsible for development, data, operations, and security of services, systems and tools to support Firefox, plus release engineering and automation. Systems we're responsible for include: production engineering, back end services, data science and telemetry systems, crash reporting, machine learning and intelligent systems, CI, prototyping and continuous delivery systems for Firefox. I report to the VPE, Firefox, and contribute as part of the Firefox strategic leadership team. I am responsible for a budget of approximately 60m.

Board Member

Internet Security Research Group

Jan 2016 - Mar 2020 (4 years 3 months)

ISRG operates Let's Encrypt, a free and open certificate authority.

Director of Engineering, Firefox Engineering Operations

Mozilla

Feb 2015 - Feb 2017 (2 years 1 month)

Lead engineering teams responsible for development, operations, security, and QA of cloud services, systems and tools to support Firefox, as well as all our release engineering and automation, management, and developer tools and productivity. This also includes development and operations of our data platform and telemetry systems, crash reporting, machine learning, geolocation, tracking protection services, product delivery, and prototyping and continuous delivery systems for Firefox ("Go Faster"). We also do production engineering for Firefox Accounts, Sync, Test Pilot, and a host of other projects.

Director of Engineering Operations

Mozilla

Aug 2014 - Feb 2015 (7 months)

I am responsible for vision, direction, and management of teams that do web development and release engineering at Mozilla. Specifically I look after Release Engineering, Release Operations, Developer Services, Web Engineering, and SUMO and Input Engineering. On the Web side, our projects include crash reporting capture and analytics, code search and static analysis, performance monitoring and graphing, l10n management, CDN and mirror management, Air Mozilla, support.mozilla.org, and input.mozilla.org. We catch three million crash reports a day, index the Mozilla codebases, and support half a billion users world-wide. On the Release side, our product is the build pipeline that delivers feature releases to end users every 6 weeks on deskto

Sr. Engineering Manager, Web Engineering and Release Engineering

Mozilla

Jan 2010 - Jul 2014 (4 years 7 months)

My team looks after web apps and systems at Mozilla that help to ship Firefox and other Mozilla products faster and better. This includes crash reporting capture and analytics, performance monitoring and graphing, l10n management, CDN and mirror management, Air Mozilla, and various other systems. We are responsible for more than 30 systems over a variety of platforms, many with complex infrastructures and high availability requirements. The web engineering team works with big data in HBase, concurrent Python, visualizations and dashboards in Python, PHP, and JavaScript, big PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, and other datastores like ElasticSearch. If it needs to be done, we'll do it. We live the "Dev" in DevOps. The team spans Webdev, Op

Senior Software Engineer

Mozilla

Sep 2007 - Dec 2010 (3 years 4 months)

* Tech lead / manage engineering for Socorro, the Firefox crash reporting project. We catch and process 3 million crashes a day. Our infrastructure is based on Python (backend), PHP (frontend), Hadoop/HBase, and PostgreSQL. I manage a cross functional team. * Lead developer on support.mozilla.com, the help destination for Firefox. SUMO was written in PHP using TikiWiki, and is now written in Django. Scaled SUMO for the launch of Firefox 3. Implemented Sphinx for searches. * Worked on the addons.mozilla.org API, tools.mozilla.com, and a number of other projects.

Principal (VP)

OmniTI

Nov 2006 - Aug 2007 (10 months)

* Consulted to internet companies about scaling, security, and development issues * New business development and client management * Managed development teams for various webapp projects

Director of Web Development

OmniTI

Apr 2006 - Nov 2006 (8 months)

* Worked on and managed various web-based projects for clients * New development, taking over maintenance, consulting in scaling and security for existing systems, and project management * Technologies used on projects: PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL

Senior Web Developer

OmniTI

Aug 2005 - Apr 2006 (9 months)

* Worked on various webapps, largely in PHP. * Led development on the web UI for what is now the Message Systems MTA * Led development on an email campaign management tool

Author

Pearson Education

Jan 2000 - Jan 2016 (16 years 1 month)

Author of the bestselling "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (now in 5/e) and "MySQL Tutorial". Tech reviewer of "PostgreSQL Developers Handbook".

Lecturer

RMIT University

Jul 1999 - Aug 2005 (6 years 2 months)

* Develop and deliver courseware, mostly to Masters students, in the area of Internet and Web Technologies * Taught PHP, C++, and Java, web related topics, database theory, software engineering, and machine learning

T

Co-founder/Principal Consultant

Tangled Web Design

Jan 1998 - Aug 2005 (7 years 8 months)

Partner in web development consultancy specialising in building complex dynamic sites using Open Source tools, especially the LAMP suite.

i

Researcher

icubed

Jan 1998 - Jul 1999 (1 year 7 months)

Multidisciplinary research team funded by Telstra and RMIT University. Developed strategic plans for implementation and use of new services and technologies inside Telstra.

Associate

Boston Consulting Group

Dec 1996 - Jan 1998 (1 year 2 months)

Develop strategy, particularly IT strategy for Fortune 500 corporations.

M

Programmer

Multimedia Database Systems

Jul 1996 - Dec 1996 (6 months)

Contract position. Developed software (in C) to support research in the area of speech querying of text databases.

About

Detail

Timeline

Résumé