Skip to content
View tschaffter's full-sized avatar
πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ
πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ

Sponsoring

@gperdomor

Organizations

@nlpsandbox

Block or report tschaffter

Block user

Prevent this user from interacting with your repositories and sending you notifications. Learn more about blocking users.

You must be logged in to block users.

Maximum 250 characters. Please don't include any personal information such as legal names or email addresses. Markdown supported. This note will be visible to only you.
Report abuse

Contact GitHub support about this user’s behavior. Learn more about reporting abuse.

Report abuse
tschaffter/README.md

Thomas Schaffter, PhD

Engineering Leader β€’ Platform Architecture β€’ Developer Experience

I build platforms and frameworks that accelerate delivery, improve reliability, and increase impact.

LinkedIn ProtonMail Google Scholar


Software engineering leader with 10+ years building developer platforms, leading cross-organization initiatives, and shipping products at the intersection of software and biomedical research. MSc and PhD from EPFL. Led teams of up to 70+ contributors across IBM, NIH, Roche/Genentech, and Mayo Clinic. Based in Switzerland, previously 10 years in the US.

Looking for my next role as Software Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, or Principal Software Engineer.

Tech Stack

Languages

Frameworks & Libraries


Data & Messaging


Infrastructure & DevOps


Testing


Security & Observability


Build Tools & Code Quality


Development Environment

AI Tools

How I Lead

🀝 Cross-Organization Collaboration β€” Led initiatives spanning IBM, NIH, Roche/Genentech, Mayo Clinic, and academic institutions, coordinating 70+ contributors across organizations

🌱 Team Building & Mentoring β€” Grew and led engineering teams, mentoring engineers from junior to senior across 5+ concurrent products

🧩 Platform Thinking β€” Designed shared developer platforms that standardize tooling, enable reusable components, and accelerate delivery for both engineers and AI agents

πŸ—οΈ Technical Strategy β€” Drove architectural modernization: monorepo adoption, cloud-native infrastructure, CI/CD automation, and AI-assisted development workflows

πŸ—£οΈ Stakeholder Communication β€” Bridged researchers, engineers, designers, data governance, clinicians, and executives to align on goals and ship impactful products

Featured Work

BioArena β€” Gamified AI Benchmarking

BioArena home page β€” logo, tagline, and community stats

BioArena Community Quest β€” Minecraft arena build and story chapters

Crowdsourced benchmarking platform where community members evaluate AI models on biomedical topics through head-to-head battles. 28 models, 248 battles, 74 users and growing. Designed the logo and brand identity. Features a Community Quest β€” a creative gamification experiment where each battle contributes a block to a medieval arena being built in Minecraft, with weekly story chapters driving engagement. An exploration in motivating crowdsourced participation through narrative and play.

Gradio Spring Boot FastAPI OpenAPI Docker AWS OpenRouter

Sage Monorepo β€” Developer Platform

Monorepo designed to improve developer experience and accelerate the development of full-stack applications. Powers 5+ products including BioArena, Agora, and MODEL-AD. Adopted by 7 engineers across 3 teams who joined the initiative and chose to build their products on the platform. Shared infrastructure, reusable components, and standardized tooling.

Nx Angular Spring Boot Java Node.js Python Docker GitHub Actions AWS CDK Dev Containers

Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge

Led a $1M biomedical AI/ML competition with 1,000+ participants, architecting secure cloud infrastructure and coordinating contributions from 70+ co-authors. Multiple winning approaches contributed to FDA-approved diagnostic tools. First author of the resulting JAMA Network Open publication.


πŸ‡¨πŸ‡­ Swiss citizen β€’ PhD from EPFL β€’ Long-distance runner

Pinned Loading

  1. Sage-Bionetworks/sage-monorepo Sage-Bionetworks/sage-monorepo Public

    ✨ Monorepo for OpenChallenges, BioArena, Agora, and other open-source apps developed to advance open science and collaborative research.

    TypeScript 26 16

  2. raspberry-pi-kernel-hardened raspberry-pi-kernel-hardened Public

    Cross-compile the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi with enhanced security in a single command.

    Shell 23 3

  3. nlpsandbox/nlpsandbox-schemas nlpsandbox/nlpsandbox-schemas Public

    OpenAPI specifications of the NLP Sandbox services

    2 4

  4. rstudio rstudio Public template

    Docker image for analyses using RStudio and Python-Conda

    Dockerfile 16 9

  5. nlpsandbox/phi-deidentifier-app nlpsandbox/phi-deidentifier-app Public

    React client for the NLP Sandbox PHI Deidentifier API

    TypeScript 1 2

  6. genenetweaver genenetweaver Public archive

    GeneNetWeaver (GNW) is an intuitive Java application developed for the generation of in silico benchmarks and the identification of systematic errors of network inference algorithms.

    Java 26 7