Tim Toll
Staff Software Development Engineer at Tesla. Linux systems, clusters, and infrastructure at scale.
Personal
I grew up in the Midwest and have lived in California since 2003, with a few years in North Carolina in the middle. I have been married since 2019, and our daughter is due around the turn of the year.
tolldog.com has been my email address and home page for more than twenty years. It goes quiet between refreshes; this one is from October 2026.
Professional
I keep exabyte-scale, S3-compatible object storage reliable for engineering workloads at Tesla, including the data behind Autopilot. The work is reliability, scaling, and automation for storage that other teams cannot afford to have slow or wrong.
I got here by way of render farms. I spent a decade running the grid at DreamWorks Animation, thousands of machines across four sites, first on LSF and then on HTCondor, and before that built the pipeline that took Big Idea from 40 SGI boxes to 500 Linux render nodes. That work put my name in the credits of about thirty films, from VeggieTales to Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon. Six years of site reliability engineering at LinkedIn followed, on the Growth and Messaging teams, where the questions became availability, metrics, and letting systems repair themselves.
Across all of it I have worked at every layer: hardware, operating systems, networking, storage, and the distributed applications on top. I like the problems that sit between those layers, where nobody owns the whole picture yet.
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2023 –
Tesla
Staff Software Development Engineer, promoted from Senior SRE in 2025. Large object storage services for internal workloads including Autopilot.
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2017 – 2023
LinkedIn
Site Reliability Engineer on Growth and Messaging. Service availability, performance audits built on Python and Pandas, auto-remediation.
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2015 – 2017
Credit Suisse
Unix Engineer. Linux deployments and configuration in Puppet, Perl, Python, and Ruby.
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2014 – 2015
RENCI
Senior Cloud Technology Systems Administrator at the Renaissance Computing Institute. Ported the GENI portal to a supported distribution.
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2013 – 2014
Motorola Mobility
Senior Systems Administrator. Linux, Perl, Puppet, and NetApp storage.
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2003 – 2013
DreamWorks Animation
Senior Systems Administrator and primary admin of the render grid: two clusters of over 20,000 cores across four sites. Migrated the studio from a decade-old LSF setup to MRG/HTCondor and merged the site clusters into one.
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2003
Orbitz
Systems Administrator. Monitoring and automation.
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1999 – 2002
Big Idea Productions
Render Architect. Built the multi-show rendering pipeline in Perl and grew the farm from 40 SGI IRIX systems to over 500 Linux nodes.
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1994 – 1999
Taylor University
B.A. in Computer Science, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computer graphics.
On the side
Most of my spare engineering goes into khonliang, an agent orchestration platform. Agents register their skills with a bus, the bus exposes them to Claude as a single MCP surface, and developer, researcher, reviewer, and librarian agents build on top of that. Most of it is public on GitHub.
Passions
Cars
I got into cars going to shows with my father, and I still think the automobile is one of the few mass-produced works of art. Three live with me: a 1967 Pontiac Catalina convertible, mostly restored and never quite finished; a 2012 Dodge Challenger R/T Classic; and a Cybertruck.
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1967 Pontiac Catalina. Big Basin, 2011. -
2012 Dodge Challenger R/T Classic. 17 Mile Drive, 2014. -
Cybertruck. Same coast, a decade later.
Photography
Cars, concerts, and the California coast, mostly. The galleries are on Flickr.