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Tom Mahle
Tom Mahle

Tom Mahle

Staff Software Engineer · Frontend architecture

I’ve spent 12+ years building web and mobile frontends. Most recently that’s been at Best Buy, where I lead frontend architecture, performance and developer tooling. I like owning hard problems end to end. That has meant migrating a flagship page to streaming SSR, finding out why users wait on the next frame, and making the right way to build the easy way, for engineers and AI coding agents alike.

Open to Staff+ roles in frontend architecture and platform.

Experience

  1. Best Buy · Staff Engineer, Unified Presentation Architecture

    2026–present

    • Made internal developer tooling 10× faster, and cut the time users wait for the next frame by 40–70% across platforms. On one platform, search results finish appearing 8 seconds faster.
    • Drove Best Buy’s first multi-version production deployment, which routes live traffic across more than 2 versions at once for real-world performance testing.
    • Wrote architecture docs that both engineers and AI coding agents can follow, so generated code fits the architecture.

  2. Best Buy · Staff Engineer, Product Detail Platform

    2023–2026

    • Designed and personally carried out the flagship Product Detail Page’s move to the Next.js App Router and streaming SSR, which gave big performance gains.
    • Created the frontend architecture now used for new apps, built to share code between web and mobile.
    • Reworked how bots access product data, removing thousands of expensive requests per second from core APIs without hurting bot-driven revenue.
    • Most senior engineer (IC) over the web and app product detail pages, while simultaneously supporting teams under several VPs.

  3. Shipt · Staff Engineer

    2021–2023

    • Extended the personal-shopper app into last-mile delivery for several Fortune 100 retailers.
    • Built multi-retailer routing, a permanent efficiency gain of more than $3M a year.
    • Pushed for simple, usable designs for gig workers, and for small, measurable increments.

Earlier: TempWorks Software, 2016–2021: Web Developer, then Software Architect, then Principal Developer. I led cross-platform React and React Native launches and mentored developers up to tech lead.

Projects

  • This website

    The site you’re on. Fast is a lot easier when things are small and simple.

    • 100 on Lighthouse, mobile and desktop. Lighthouse shows fireworks when you manage that; if you don’t see them, try an incognito window to rule out extensions, and let me know if there’s still an issue 😁
    • Started as a copy of the Find a Park repo, history included, so it inherits that project’s simple, blazing fast and super reliable setup: Next.js 16, accessibility tests in both color themes, and CI on every push.
    • Built with Claude Code under my careful direction.
    • Runs on Vercel’s free plan, with self-hosted images and map tiles sized to fit.
    • Next.js 16
    • TypeScript
    • Tailwind CSS
    • Vercel
    • WCAG 2.2 AA

  • Find a Park

    A take-home exercise: an accessible NYC park finder with a list, a map and park pages, submitted after 2 hours of my own time. Later, in under half an hour of wall time, I made it a better citizen of the web.

    • Bigger and more complex than this site, and still 100 on Lighthouse, mobile and desktop. Still nothing compared to enterprise software.
    • I set the architecture and direction, Claude Code built it, and I reviewed and steered every change.
    • Meets WCAG 2.2 AA, every map feature works by keyboard, and missing data never breaks a page. Automated browser and accessibility tests run in CI.
    • Map tiles and photos are self-hosted instead of loaded from OpenStreetMap’s and Wikimedia’s servers.
    • Self-hosting the tiles was simple: the map asks for only the bytes it needs with HTTP Range requests, and Next.js serves those out of the box.
    • The full AI conversation logs for the submission are included alongside the source.
    • Next.js 16
    • TypeScript
    • Leaflet
    • WCAG 2.2 AA
    • Playwright + axe