MT mikethoun.com

Data engineering leader· Chicago

Mike Thoun

I built the core data platforms and led the data teams at Outcome Health, Lob, and Autograph, most recently as Autograph's first data hire and head of data after its $170M Series B. I learned the trade running 75+ TB of trading databases at a high-frequency options market maker. On the side, I build golf apps at Greenside Ventures.

hello@mikethoun.com LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗

Experience

  1. Feb 2025 – Now

    Greenside Ventures

    Founder

    Digital product studio and holding company in golf

    Solo founder. It's a passion project I run on the side. Shipped GolfBod, the gym app for golfers, with an LLM pipeline that writes each golfer's training program, then added a coaching product for teaching pros. Also built Putt Pitch Drive and Golf Tactics, a daily golf strategy game.

    TypeScript · React Native · Expo · Next.js · Three.js · Supabase · LLMs · Stripe

    Fitness · iOS & Android

    GolfBod

    The gym app for golfers. 4.8 stars on the App Store.

    golfbod.app     Juniors · iOS & Android

    Putt Pitch Drive

    Practice app for golf skills competitions.

    puttpitchdrive.com     Strategy game · Web

    Golf Tactics

    A daily golf strategy game where everyone plays the same hole. Opens November 2.

    golftactics.com

  2. Aug 2022 – Feb 20252y 7m

    Autograph

    Tech Lead, Data

    Tom Brady's digital sports fandom startup (acquired by Future, 2025)

    First data hire after the $170M Series B. Built the company's first data platform, with pipelines in production by day 60, then hired two senior engineers. About a third of the company used the self-service analytics.

    Snowflake · dbt · Dagster · Fivetran · Hex · Lightdash · MongoDB · Neo4j · PostgreSQL

  3. Apr 2021 – Aug 20221y 5m

    Lob

    Staff Software Engineer, Data

    Y Combinator-backed mail API startup

    Data lead. Rebuilt the core data infrastructure as one platform. Moved ingestion off Fivetran onto in-house Airflow jobs and redesigned the data model as Kimball-style facts and dimensions in dbt. Every Looker dashboard in the company ran on it.

    Airflow · dbt · Redshift · Looker · Kinesis · S3

  4. Feb 2017 – May 20214y 4m

    Outcome Health

    Lead Data Engineer

    Chicago unicorn health tech startup (merged with PatientPoint, 2021)

    Designed and built the company's core data platform, batch and streaming, and later migrated it to Snowflake. Joined before there was a data team, then co-founded one and hired eight people into it.

    Python · Redshift · Snowflake · Airflow · Confluent Kafka · Spark · S3

  5. Apr 2016 – Now

    Merino Wealth Management

    ContractHead of Technology

    Financial planning firm for equity compensation, socially responsible investing, and women entrepreneurs

    Part-time head of all the firm's technology, reporting to the CEO. Moved the CRM from Redtail to Salesforce. Brought in Viktor, an AI agent, and built its skills for meeting prep, follow-up, and data updates.

    Salesforce · Black Diamond · Viktor

  6. Jan 2009 – Feb 20178y 2m

    Spot Trading

    Lead Database Administrator

    High-frequency options market maker

    Designed, deployed, and ran the firm's databases, 75+ TB of live and historical market data across SQL Server, Vertica, Cassandra, and MongoDB, plus Redshift and RDS on AWS. Joined in operations and ended up running the data team.

    SQL Server · MongoDB · Cassandra · Vertica · Redshift · RDS

  7. Jul 2005 – Dec 20083y 6m

    CME Group

    Infrastructure Engineer II

    World's largest derivatives exchange

    Supported physical-layer changes across CME's data centers. Built and ran the team's internal web app for planning changes and tracking physical assets.

Toolkit

Data platform

  • Python, SQL
  • Snowflake, Redshift
  • dbt, Fivetran
  • Airflow, Dagster
  • Kafka, Spark
  • Looker, Hex, Lightdash

Databases

  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Cassandra
  • Vertica
  • Neo4j

Contact