Tom Taylor

Experience

• Jan 2026 – now

  Head of Development · Admit One

  • Lead the Development department of 9: three core developers, three web developers, two QA engineers and a data engineer.
  • Set the technical direction, standards and ways of working for the whole department, and still write a lot of the code myself.
  • The software runs ticketing, point of sale, kiosks and catering for hundreds of cinema customers across the US, Mexico, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Spain, New Zealand and Kenya.
• 2026 – now

  Founder and sole engineer · Dashcat

  • Built a product that lets AI apps check, fix and update Windows, Mac and Linux machines, now in invite-only production at dashcat.ai.
  • Designed its trust model for software with machine access: commands signed for one machine that expire in 60 seconds, a permissions matrix, approval prompts at the machine, opt-in admin commands, signed updates, and machine output treated as untrusted data.
  • Rust agent and TypeScript cloud on Cloudflare: about 44,000 lines of Rust, over 500 Rust tests, and every design decision written down in more than 60 architecture decision records.
• 2021 – 2025

  Core Development Team Lead · Admit One

  • Led the core development team behind the company’s desktop suite.
  • Moved the team from single-lock source control to git and agile, reviewed and merged every pull request, and later brought the web team into git and Docker.
  • Wrote the build manager that builds the whole suite and packages it for customers, saving hours a day.
• 2018 – 2021

  Software Engineer · Admit One

  • Built point-of-sale, ticketing, kiosk and catering software used by hundreds of cinemas, including device drivers for receipt printers and pin pads.
  • Worked through COVID to keep customers running.
• 2016 – 2018

  Junior App Developer · Resort Marketing

  • Built over a dozen iOS and Android apps.

Selected projects

• 2026

  Testing how AI agents can be misled

  An independent experiment on how text planted in logs, files and dialogs can steer agents that manage machines, and which of four deployer safeguards stop it. Harm is measured from outside the machine, against canary targets on throwaway VMs.

• 2026

  Reverse engineering Resident Evil 3

  A multi-agent pipeline that rebuilds C source for Resident Evil 3 (1999, PC), crediting a function only when the original compiler reproduces the shipped machine code. 3,687 functions recovered, 99.2% of the game’s own code.

• Ongoing

  Lorenz SZ40 simulator

  A simulator of the WWII cipher machine that models its twelve wheels, rebuilt in each language I learn: C++, Windows Forms, Delphi, Java on Android (published on Google Play) and TypeScript.

• 2024 – now

  Pocket Wars

  A turn-based strategy game in Godot, with a component-based unit design and a computer opponent that weighs attacking against retreating on every move.

• 2021

  Super Payload Launcher

  A cross-platform Electron app that boots a Nintendo Switch into homebrew firmware, built for people who aren’t developers. My most-starred open source project, downloaded hundreds of times.

Skills

Languages

TypeScript, Delphi, Rust, Python, C#, Dart and Flutter, SQL. Earlier: Swift, Java, C and C++.

Platforms

Node, React, Cloudflare Workers, Docker, PostgreSQL. Windows, macOS and Linux internals.

Security

Mutual TLS and key pinning, signed and expiring commands, permission models, OAuth 2.1, treating tool output as untrusted.

AI tooling

MCP servers and clients, the Claude API, agent guardrails, multi-agent pipelines with verification.

Practice

Leading teams, code review, architecture decision records, release engineering, agile delivery.

Education

• 2012 – 2015

  CertHE Games Technology · University of the West of England

• 2010 – 2012

  BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma, Interactive Media · Weymouth College