About

Evan Tahler

Hi! I'm Evan. I've been building software professionally since 2009. My expertise sits at the intersection of two things: building the technical side of digital products, and growing the engineering teams required to do so. Most of my work has been on developer-facing infrastructure: open-source frameworks, data pipelines, and now agentic tools. I write about what I'm working on at /blog.

Currently Head of Engineering at Arcade.dev. Previously Director of Engineering at Airbyte, CTO and co-founder of Grouparoo.

What I'm working on now

At Arcade.dev I lead the engineering team building the runtime for secure, scalable agentic tools: the layer that lets AI models actually take real-world actions on a user's behalf without the whole thing collapsing into a security incident.

In my spare time I'm building Keryx, a fullstack TypeScript framework where one Action class becomes an HTTP API, an MCP server, a WebSocket handler, a CLI tool, and a background task runner. I'm also building macos-ts, which gives you typed APIs over your iCloud data.

What I've built

I'm probably best known in open source for Actionhero and node-resque: the realtime multi-transport Node.js framework and the Redis-backed background-job system I've maintained since 2012. Other projects:

Keryx: fullstack TypeScript framework for APIs and MCP servers (current focus)
elasticsearch-dump: import/export tools for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch (~7.9k stars, started at TaskRabbit)
Grouparoo: open-source reverse-ETL, acquired by Airbyte in 2021

The full list lives at /open-source. If any of it's useful to you, GitHub Sponsors keeps the lights on.

How I got here

The through-line across every role has been the same: developer tools, data, and middleware. The infrastructure that sits between an application and what makes it work, and the engineering teams that ship it.

Arcade.dev: Head of Engineering. Leading the team building the runtime for secure, scalable agentic tools.
Airbyte: Director of Engineering, Sync Foundations. Built and led the teams focused on high-volume data movement and AI pipelines.
Grouparoo: CTO and co-founder of the open-source reverse-ETL company. Built the engineering team and the platform; acquired by Airbyte in 2021.
Earlier: engineering and product roles helping Disney, TaskRabbit, ModCloth, and Airbus launch new global digital initiatives. Co-founded three successful startups along the way; named on multiple patents around authentication and digital entertainment.

I'm also a frequent speaker at software development conferences on AI, product management, data engineering, Node.js, TypeScript, and DevOps. The full list of talks is at /speaking.

I went to Carnegie Mellon for both undergrad (BS, Mechanical Engineering) and grad school (MS, Entertainment Technology), which is a less surprising combination than it sounds.