Steven Tomlinson

Steven B. Tomlinson

Steven B. Tomlinson profile picture

Senior Software Solution Architect

Las Vegas, NV

Overview

I am a senior software solution architect with more than 30 years of professional experience designing, building, modernizing, and operating complex software systems.

My career spans enterprise platforms, developer tooling, distributed systems, data-intensive applications, and emerging decentralized infrastructure. I have worked across Microsoft and Linux ecosystems, from early client/server architectures through modern cloud-native and protocol-driven systems.

What distinguishes my work is not familiarity with tools, but architectural judgment — knowing which decisions matter, when they matter, and how long teams will live with them.

What I Do

I help organizations design systems that:

  • Remain understandable as they scale
  • Survive personnel and technology change
  • Integrate legacy and modern platforms safely
  • Treat identity, data, and trust as first-class concerns

My role often sits between engineering leadership, security, and delivery teams — translating business ambiguity into technical structure that engineers can execute without constant re-interpretation.

Architectural Domains

Over the course of my career, I have designed and delivered systems across:

  • Enterprise application architecture (ASP.NET, distributed services, integration layers)
  • Identity and access management (authentication, authorization, trust boundaries)
  • Data-centric systems (relational, document, event-driven)
  • Developer platforms and reusable frameworks
  • Hybrid and distributed architectures, including protocol- and blockchain-backed systems
  • Modernization initiatives spanning decades-old systems and contemporary platforms

I am equally comfortable working at whiteboard, codebase, and operational levels — and I expect architectures to survive contact with reality.

AI & Emerging Technologies

My recent focus includes the architectural implications of generative AI, agent-based systems, and decentralized infrastructure.

I approach these domains not as consumer tools, but as architectural forces that alter system boundaries, governance models, and long-term sustainability.

Key areas of active work:

  • AI Agent Systems — Understanding how generative and agent-based AI reshapes system design, operational boundaries, and organizational governance
  • Decentralized Finance & Protocol Infrastructure — Developing architectural fluency in trust models, financial primitives, and enterprise integration patterns
  • AI Portfolio & Research — Maintaining an active portfolio of certification labs, experiments, and reference implementations
  • Protocol Engineering — Building secure, verifiable systems including the Lockb0x Codex Forge Chrome extension for digital provenance

These efforts are documented through formal certifications and coursework through Google Cloud AI certification, Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, Duke University, MIT, Berkeley and are applied to practical system implementations — not just theoretical exploration.

For detailed information on certifications and coursework, see my Continuing Education page.

Architectural Philosophy

I do not treat architecture as diagrams or abstractions. I treat it as decision-making under constraint.

Good architecture answers hard questions early:

  • What must not fail
  • What must scale
  • What must remain flexible over time
  • What can be allowed to change — and what cannot

My approach favors explicit boundaries, predictable failure modes, and systems that can evolve without rewrites.

Public Work & Reference Implementations

My public repositories and projects are intentionally architectural in nature.

They emphasize:

  • Reference architectures over demos
  • Reusable system components over one-off solutions
  • Explicit handling of identity, trust, and integration boundaries

Examples include:

  • Identity-aware ASP.NET application frameworks
  • Reusable Razor component systems
  • Composable infrastructure exploring decentralized workflows responsibly
  • AI Portfolio — Certification labs and research implementations demonstrating agent-based systems, Azure AI integration, and architectural patterns
  • Lockb0x Codex Forge — Protocol-driven Chrome extension for secure, verifiable digital provenance with cryptographic proofs

These projects are maintained as living examples, not static showcases.

For detailed information on AI-related projects, see my AI Projects & Research page.

How I Work

I work best with teams facing complexity, scale, or long-term responsibility.

My contribution is rarely just code — it is helping teams understand:

  • Which problems are real
  • Which problems are premature
  • Which problems are inevitable

The goal is not architectural purity, but systems teams can live with for years.