Thiago Robert C. Santos

thiagorobert@gmail.com +1 415-744-4092 San Francisco, CA linkedin.com/in/thiagorobert github.com/thiagorobert blog.thiago.pub

WORK EXPERIENCE

Grounded Agents (0 → 1) Founding Engineer Oct 2025 - Present
Grounded Agents (stealth, backed by Greycroft) provides an AI executive assistant that maps a leader's professional world (people, projects, dependencies, decisions) and proactively surfaces what needs their attention. As the founding engineer I built the system end to end:
  • LLM provider layer. Routing across Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI models over Bedrock, Vertex, and native APIs, with a bidirectional circuit breaker that fails over between platforms and a fallback selector that matches context-window size rather than capability tier alone. Also reasoning-effort control and a model catalog.
  • Context and cost control for long-running agents. Input truncation, token budgeting, and compaction so hour-long runs land a result instead of getting cut off; per-run turn caps set from p99 production telemetry; prompt caching holding ~70% hit rate.
  • Durable agent runtime. Designed and implemented an agent execution pipeline based on Temporal workflows, providing resumable runs, scheduled fan-out, and turn and token budgets with an explicit wrap-up path.
  • Knowledge graph (Neo4j). Provenance-first: every claim points at a message or document a person actually wrote, so a model's inference can't be promoted into a stated fact. Entity resolution reconciles the same person, project, or decision across Slack, email, and documents into a single node.
  • Observability and spend attribution. Metric taxonomy, log classification, and the dashboards and monitors for the LLM path: per-model, per-agent, per-tenant cost attribution and failover visibility.
  • BYOC (bring your own cloud). Customer-deployable stack based on Terraform, an umbrella Helm chart, and a reconciler that keeps a customer-run installation in sync. Plus the required security infrastructure: Teleport just-in-time access, WAF, TLS enforcement on the graph store, KMS.
Google Cloud Platform Senior → Staff SRE Sep 2017 - Sep 2025
Four projects over eight years. As an SRE on Google's Traffic team, where the SRE discipline originated, I led incident response for GCP's family of load balancer products, the highest-grossing suite in GCP. I also led an effort across SRE teams to pin down their real reliability guarantees (in terms of RPO/RTO) and publish the findings to prospective customers, unlocking millions of dollars in deals that depended on that data. On the product side, I launched Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and Docker-based custom runtimes for App Engine, and worked on “Sharded Google”, which let customers with sovereignty and isolation requirements run their own private GCP regions.
Twitter Periscope (0 → 1) Staff SWE Jul 2015 - Sep 2017
Periscope's launch in early 2015 brought live streaming into the Zeitgeist, allowing non-technical users to record and share live video with the touch of a button. I automated much of Periscope's operations, built internal tools for Support, Safety, and Usage Metrics, and extended the service's Platform and API.
YouTube Creator Commerce Software Engineer Jan 2014 - Jun 2015
I led the implementation and rollout of three content monetization initiatives for YouTube's Creator Commerce team: channels and channel subscriptions, purchase/rental of movies and shows, and YouTube Premium.
Google X Project Glass (0 → 1) Software Engineer Jan 2012 - Dec 2013
I joined Project Glass as the 8th member of the software team and stayed through the launch of Glass V1, by which point it had grown to 75 engineers. During that time I contributed to the best live demo of all time↗, the launch of a developer API and SDK, and an epic marketing campaign for the product, learning valuable insights on consumer electronics manufacturing, and probably more than I wished to know about batteries.
Google Web Search Software Engineer Jan 2008 - Dec 2011
As a tech lead in the Search Infrastructure team, I developed systems that constantly monitor the Web for changes, copy new content as it is detected, extract the signals used to rank it, and serve the result through an always-on, industry-leading web search service.
Google Mobile Software Engineer Sep 2005 - Dec 2007
I designed and delivered the test automation platform for Google's mobile products, covering in-house mobile apps and the Search and Ads Syndication APIs offered to partners. I led the team as it grew from 2 engineers to roughly 20 across 6 countries.
Motorola BDC Software Engineer Apr 2001 - Mar 2005
I led a team of 15 developers building a white-box Java framework that automates testing of cell phone application software, in a project sponsored by Motorola's Brazil Design Center and UFSC.

VOLUNTEERING

EDUCATION

M.Sc. in Computer Science UFSC, Brazil 2003 - 2005
Research area: High-performance computing↗
Publications: Three peer-reviewed papers on cluster communication (COSET ’04↗, HPCS ’05↗, CLEI ’06↗).
B.Sc. in Computer Science UFSC, Brazil 1998 - 2002

INTERESTS