Eric Thompson
Favorite part of my job: Watching a team get unblocked. There’s a specific kind of momentum that shows up when the right structure, tooling, and trust line up, and delivery stops feeling like a fight.
I got hooked on tech: Building test harnesses early in my career and realizing that the systems around the code (how you build it, test it, and ship it) were as interesting as the code itself.
I love to also: Get outside in the Pacific Northwest, build with wood or code, and tinker with whatever new AI tool just dropped (usually past the point my family finds reasonable).
Leaders who inspire me: Grace Hopper. She invented the compiler when nobody thought machines could do that, shipped COBOL, and spent decades convincing rooms full of skeptics.
Fictional Alter Ego: Doc Brown. Builds the thing nobody commissioned in the garage nobody’s watching, gets it mostly right, and is already excited about what broke.
Superpower: Turning a frustrated, high-change engineering org into one that ships, without burning out the people or losing the customers.
Eric Thompson is VP of Engineering at ActiveState and an engineering executive with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling enterprise software and developer-tools organizations. He joins ActiveState from Kion, where he served as VP of Engineering for a FinOps platform serving regulated enterprises, and where he launched an MCP-based AI assistant and made a very effective early AI adoption across Engineering. Earlier, at Puppet he led part of engineering through two acquisitions, including Puppet’s own acquisition by Perforce Software. He is known for embedding AI tooling early, restructuring teams for delivery speed, and measuring success by customer and business outcomes rather than activity.
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