About

Hi, I’m Tom Mango. I live in Philadelphia with my wife and kids. I’m a Principal Engineer at North, and I occasionally advise startups and engineering leaders on org design, platform reliability, incident response, and developing new leaders. I’m also actively building Looping, a platform for software organizations that connects architecture, teams, planning, operations, and documentation into a single system.

Previously, I was a Senior Director of Engineering at Recharge and an early engineering leader at TaxJar, where I helped scale the team and platform prior to its acquisition by Stripe. I also co-founded Limited Run, an independent ecommerce platform I’ve operated and engineered since 2009.

Over nearly 25 years, I’ve been a software engineer, entrepreneur, and engineering leader. I care deeply about building high-performance teams and developing highly available web services, especially at scale.

Here at Sleeping Potato, I write about engineering leadership, side projects, and the practical lessons I’ve learned (and continue to learn) from both. I hope these lessons will be useful to others building teams or scaling systems.

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

You can learn more about my advising work here. You can also find me on Mastodon, Bluesky, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Why "Sleeping Potato"?

Many years ago, we had sleepy greyhound named Potato. He was a very good boy.