Gareth Tomlinson · Engineer · Available Q2 2026

Systems engineer. Quantitative modeler. Energy trader. Not sequentially — simultaneously.

Name
Gareth Tomlinson
Location
Post Falls, ID
↓ Scroll Built in Ruby on Rails · 2026
§ 01 / The Pitch

Two careers. One person.

— A note from Gareth

Most people in energy markets end up in trading or engineering. For fifteen years I've been both — trading power in real-time while building the quantitative systems that made better decisions possible.

I've modelled the entire western electrical grid end-to-end, built distributed platforms processing tens of thousands of simulations, and shipped production software into environments governed by NERC reliability standards. I started writing code independently while sitting at a trading desk, because the tools I needed didn't exist.

Today I build AI-native platforms where domain knowledge is the differentiator. The rare part isn't knowing Python or Go — it's knowing what the software is actually for.

§ 02 / Career

Fifteen years, two tracks, one arc.

01Trading · Operations
02Engineering · Quant
03Founder · Staff
Click any role to read what was built there
§ 03 / Built Things

Four projects worth reading the source.

01 —
FTR Analytics Platform
Viribus Fund · 2025 →
+
A distributed portfolio processing platform where AI is a first-class operator.
01 DAG engine with topological sort, atomic state transitions, resume on failure.
02 Two-tier caching: step-level and row-level — eliminating duplicate computation.
03 Automatic parallelisation: fan-out across Modal serverless workers, configured with one line.
04 Claude can register steps, publish workflows, and launch backtests directly via MCP.
02 —
GridOptix
Semaphore Energy · 2022 → 2024
+
12 WECC trading hubs. 97% faster than industry tools. Built alone.
01 Modelled the entire western grid: demand, solar, wind, hydro, dispatch, transmission, market clearing prices.
02 Distributed compute via NATS for parallel simulation across zero-scale workers.
03 Scenario-driven futures: growth, policy, weather volatility.
04 Sole engineer across architecture, modelling, infrastructure, operations.
03 —
Integrated Resource Plan Modeling
Tacoma Power · 2019 → 2020
+
A 20-year look at the western grid, simulated tens of thousands of times.
01 Built the simulation platform from scratch — Go microservices, configurable resources.
02 Tens of thousands of 20-year simulations across hypothetical portfolios, weather, and possible future scenarios.
03 Novel approach to simulating optimal dispatch of cascading hydro resources.
04 Delivered the filed IRP on schedule.
04 —
EIM Entry System
Tacoma Power · 2021 → 2022
+
Real-time optimisation software for a $20M market entry project.
01 Delivered on time; saved hundreds of thousands vs. vendor solution.
02 Pivotal component of Tacoma Power's successful EIM market entry in 2022.
03 Custom real-time optimisation under NERC reliability standards.
§ 04 / Skills

The tools, grouped well.

01 Languages & Systems
Go Python SQL JavaScript Dart gRPC GraphQL REST Kafka NATS Protocol Buffers FastAPI
02 Data & Compute
Snowflake PostgreSQL DuckDB InfluxDB Polars Pandas Parquet S3 Modal
03 Infrastructure
AWS (ECS, Fargate, RDS, EC2, IAM, SES) Docker Terraform CI/CD Grafana
04 AI Tooling
MCP Claude Code Custom Claude Skills Cursor
§ 05 / Contact

Two ways. Pick one.

ADirect
Send a note. I read every one.
BAsk the model
Talk to a copy of Gareth's résumé.
Résumé · AI
I'm an AI built from Gareth's background. Ask me anything about his experience, the projects he's built, or how he thinks.
Why both trader and engineer? Tell me about GridOptix What does AI-native mean here? Is he available?