Toby Northcote-Smith
VP, Platform Engineering, Tala·Senior Engineering Leader of Amazing People | AI-native, privacy-first product engineering | 0→1 builder scaling orgs to global scale | ex-Amazon/Ring, Whatnot, Disney, Grindr, LucasArts
About
I'm Toby, a CTO and VP Engineering who builds product engineering orgs from zero and scales them globally. At Tala I led the AI-native transformation of 120+ engineers: an agentic harness with real safety rules that cut delivery from months to days and deploys from weeks to minutes, and "Tala in a Box," a configurable platform that took the business from 3 to 8 markets in under a year. Before that I scaled Ring's mobile org from 25 to 150+ across 16 teams as users tripled to 19.5M, ran engineering at Whatnot through live-commerce hypergrowth, and rebuilt Grindr's real-time infrastructure to 400M messages a day. My first shipped products were Star Wars games at LucasArts. I still build: anonopia, my anonymous-connection product, is live today, built solo with Claude, with end-to-end encryption composed from cryptographic primitives.
Ask me about scaling engineering orgs, 0 to 1 product building, agentic development, and what it takes to make AI personas people actually trust.
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