Dr. Trevor Fountain

Trevor Fountain is a co-founder at Quail, a software startup building small-business tools for small-town entrepreneurs. Prior to that, he was a co-founder at Majeure, a software engineering consultancy building bespoke full-stack tools for UK healthcare & professional service enterprises, a senior software engineer at Palantir Technologies, a big-data software development and consulting company, a co-founder at Blazing Griffin, a game development studio in Edinburgh, and a publisher at Far Off Places, a magazine of written whimsy. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, where he studied models of natural language categorisation and hierarchy inference under Mirella Lapata. He obtained his undergraduate degree from The University of Texas at Austin, in the Computer Science department, and graduated with honors as one of the first class of Turing Scholars.

He is a skilled software developer and interface/interaction designer, as comfortable building modern full-stack web applications in React and Java as he is shipping delightful cross-platform mobile apps or slinging pixels across the GPU in game development. He has worked as part of a large team (at Lockheed Martin and Sun Microsystems), as a leader of small teams (at Palantir and Blazing Griffin), and as a co-founder in a couple of small startups. If you're looking for a lightning-fast prototyping engineer, a highly trained data scientist, or an engineering team leader, he can be bought.

Contact Information

Experience Highlights

December 2016 - Present

Founder

QuailHQ.com

Sole founder on a SaaS product that provides point-of-sale and reporting tools to antique stores & vendor malls. Grew the product from an innocent question into a thriving ($120k+ ARR) application that hundreds of people use everyday to run their business.

August 2020 - Februrary 2021

Co-Founder, Director

Majeure

Co-Founder at a software consultancy building bespoke critical systems for enterprise clients in the UK, EU, and AMEA, with a focus on healthcare (especially clinical trials and pharmaceutical research) and professional service (legal & financial) clients. Also developed internal-facing developer tools to accelerate delivery of client projects.

December 2013 - March 2020

Senior Software Engineer

Palantir Technologies

Led teams of 2-8 engineers and consultants to develop custom solutions to data and analysis problems at tremendous scale. Built realtime alerting systems for national intelligence agencies, cutting-edge research systems for a major oil producer, fraud detection tools for a customer-facing Fortune 1000 company, and the primary manufacturing system for a major European aircraft manufacturer.

March 2011 - October 2013

Co-Founder

Blazing Griffin

Designed a technology strategy for a small startup and oversaw development of iOS and PC projects. Hired and managed an engineering team, developed new IP, and grew the company from two people in a coffeeshop to a full-time staff of eleven.

June 2013 - August 2013

Geek-in-Residence

SYNC & Edinburgh Art Festival

Designed, developed, and deployed a strategy for increasing engagement with the arts through creative use of consumer technology.

November 2012 - April 2017

Co-Founder & Digital Publisher

Far Off Places

Designed a business strategy and supporting publishing system for a literary magazine spanning multiple distribution channels and payment models, including a custom iOS app and online subscription delivery service.

March 2007 - August 2008

Developer

SUN Microsystems

Extended various open-source packages to assemble an in-house system for asset and issue tracking that became a core part of Sun Austin's data center offering.

May 2006 - February 2007

Intern

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

Worked with a team of engineers to develop enterprise software tools used to build the F-35.

Publications

Education

Autumn 2008 - Autumn 2012

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Edinburgh Informatics & Cognitive Science
Autumn 2004 - Spring 2008

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Honors

Turing Scholars Program The University of Texas at Austin

Skills

(Recent) Programming Languages

Typescript, Ruby, Java, Objective-C, Javascript, Swift, C#, C, C++

(Beloved) Operating Systems

macOS, most *nixes, Microsoft Windows XP, Macintosh System 7

(Frequently-Used) Technologies

React Native, Dropwizard, Stripe, React, Cocoa, Unity3D, Apache Kafka

Awards and Honors

Summer 2013

SYNC Arts & Technology Residency

Autumn 2005 - Spring 2008

University Honors

2004 - 2008

Turing Scholars Honors Program

2004

National Merit Scholar

2004

High School Valedictorian

2003

Eagle Scout