ServicesCase studiesAbout

I'm Tom Filepp. I run a solo practice building and modernizing content, audio, and classification systems — the kind of work where the platform has real users, real history, and no room to fall over. Fixed-scope audits, fractional CTO engagements, and focused builds. Scoped on a discovery call, delivered in weeks, not quarters.

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What people hire me for

Concrete outcomes, not a skill cloud.

  • Figure out why their content ingestion pipeline is fragile, and produce a written plan for fixing it.
  • Classify a large catalog — genres, topics, tags — when manual tagging isn't realistic and generic LLM calls aren't accurate enough.
  • Modernize a Laravel or Python codebase — upgrades, performance, local dev environments, queue config — without stalling feature work. Laravel today as a productized audit; Python codebases on request.
  • Plan a frontend migration (Vue 2 to 3, React to Vue, incremental TypeScript) that ships instead of stalling.
  • Advise at the CTO level for pre-seed and seed-stage startups: architecture, hiring, vendor decisions, investor DD.
  • Audit an audio or music platform architecture from someone who has actually built them.
Selected work

Four detailed case studies.

  • Revolver USA — 20-year relationship. Content ingestion, NLP-based genre classification across a ~100K-product catalog, and the audio preview pipeline behind their store.
  • CASH Music — Senior engineer and later de facto tech lead on the open-source artist platform before it folded in 2020. Led the platform re-engineering effort.
  • Sky Therapeutics — De facto technical co-founder for a digital therapeutics startup. Designed the full technical roadmap, infrastructure, and hiring process from zero.
  • XRAY.fm — Built the multi-tenant podcast hosting platform for the Portland nonprofit radio station, including RSS syndication and dynamic ad-stitching.
Read the case studies
Featured services

Fixed-scope engagements, scoped on a discovery call.

Advisory

Fractional CTO

Senior technical leadership for pre-seed and seed startups that don't need a full-time CTO yet.

Multi-month retainer3-month minimum · 3–5 hours/week
AI & NLP

Content Taxonomy & NLP Classification

Automatic categorization from text — genres, topics, tags — so your catalog stays consistent.

Two-phase engagement1 week
Data

Audio / Music Platform Architecture

Architecture consulting for audio and music platforms, from someone who has actually built them.

Fixed-scope engagement2–4 weeks
See the full services catalog