Tuomas Artman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Linear, the software-development platform he founded in 2019 with Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo. A former Uber senior staff engineer, he has made fast, carefully designed software his central engineering concern, from the synchronization architecture beneath Linear to its approach to code review and AI-assisted development.
Artman began his career in Finland, working on interactive software before helping establish the development agency Valve Group in 2000 and becoming its chief technology officer. In 2011, he moved to China to serve as chief technology officer of gaming company Apple Toon, where he built a synchronization engine for multiplayer games operating over unreliable networks.
At Groupon, which he joined in 2012, he worked on payments and point-of-sale systems that continued functioning offline before synchronizing when connectivity returned. He joined Uber in 2014, working on mobile infrastructure and Uber’s RIBs application architecture. Initially an engineering manager, he later became a senior staff engineer. His independent Swift projects, including the event-observation library Signals, reflect an additional interest in lightweight developer tools.
Uber’s hypergrowth exposed Artman to the consequences of prioritizing feature velocity over product quality. When he co-founded Linear, he applied his experience with distributed systems to a product designed around responsive interactions, restrained workflows, and engineers who understand their customers.
- The Linear Sync Engine: Artman designed an architecture that keeps shared application data available locally and synchronizes changes across clients, removing network delays from everyday interactions. His work on scaling the synchronization engine informed subsequent multi-region infrastructure supporting European data residency and regional request routing.
- Quality Wednesdays: Artman established a weekly practice requiring engineers to identify and fix overlooked product imperfections themselves. The resulting quality-focused engineering habit improves details such as animations, keyboard interactions, and accessibility while training engineers to prevent similar problems in future work.
- Zero-bugs policy: Working with Sabin Roman, Artman formalized a bug-resolution policy under which defects are deliberately declined or promptly assigned and addressed. Its published targets are two days for high-priority bugs and seven days for lower-priority issues.
- Product judgment in the age of AI: Artman argues that coding agents make indiscriminate feature creation easier without acquiring human sensitivity to responsiveness, animation, and customer needs. At AI Engineer Europe 2026, he described software engineers increasingly becoming product engineers who identify underlying customer problems and decide which features deserve to exist.
- Linear Diffs: Artman introduced Linear Diffs in 2026 to address the rising volume of agent-generated code. Its guided reviews connect proposed changes with the issues, projects, and customer requests behind them, helping reviewers assess whether the implementation solves the right problem.
