Tommy Dang is a self-taught coder and startup founder working to make data engineering more accessible. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended UC Berkeley, then spent more than five years at Airbnb, where he worked as both a software engineer and a data engineer. At Airbnb he developed data tools for developers, an experience that gave him a front-row view of how much pain data teams feel when their tooling gets in the way, and a clear sense of what better tooling could unlock.

In 2021, Tommy set out to fix that. He embarked on a new venture called Mage with the goal of making data engineering more accessible to every developer, not just those at large technology companies. As the founder, he drives the product vision: data pipelines that are easy to build, test, and operate, so teams can spend their time on the data products themselves instead of fighting their infrastructure.

His mission is straightforward: provide developers with the necessary data tools to create innovative and enchanting products. Tommy’s path from self-taught programmer, to data engineer at one of the world’s most data-driven companies, to founder shapes how he builds and how he talks about the craft of data engineering.