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Tomás Östberg
Director of Practice · Co-founder · Former Staff Engineer at Stripe
The network always lies. Build the muscle to argue with your past self at three in the morning.
Areas of practice.
A non-exhaustive list of what Tomás works on, has shipped, or has very strong opinions about.
Working on.
Twelve years on Stripe's payments infrastructure — first in the consensus team, then leading the payments-network rewrite. I left Stripe in 2024 to consult and to build Lattice with Mira.
I have strong opinions about clocks. I have stronger opinions about the people who confidently quote Lamport without having read past page three.
What I teach is the practical edge of distributed systems — the part that comes after you've understood the textbook and before you trust it in production. We build a small Raft from scratch. We measure what happens when a partition heals. We argue about whether linearizability is the property you actually need.
Most of my consulting these days is post-incident: a payments company has lost data, or a database team is trying to introduce a new consistency model, and they need someone outside the room. The work has made me a better teacher — I know exactly which assumptions get people in trouble.
In the curriculum.
Recent writing & talks.
A small, current selection. The full list lives in the Lattice Journal archive.
Currently on the desk.
What Tomás is reading or returning to. Many of these are assigned somewhere in the curriculum.
- 01Designing Data-Intensive Applications · Kleppmann2017
- 02A Note on Distributed Computing · Waldo et al.1994
- 03Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events · Lamport1978
- 04A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype · Kleppmann & Beresford2017
- 05In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm · Ongaro & Ousterhout2014
Reserve a seat in
Distributed Systems.
Tomás's Distributed Systems course opens for Cohort XIII in January 2026. Twelve weeks, hybrid (Berlin + remote), capped at twenty-four students.
Begin your application