About Tom Lang
I help growth-stage companies get their technology led right — as a fractional or interim CTO — without a full-time hire.
A CTO who's actually done it — scaled the org, come through the acquisitions, and still has hands on today's tools — so your roadmap moves, your biggest build-or-buy calls are sound, and you're not paying full-time-exec prices to get there. And when the stakes are real — regulated data, legacy systems you can't rip out, or an AI bet you can't get wrong — that's exactly where I've spent my career.
From the factory floor to the cloud
I started as an electrical engineer. My first decade was at Procter & Gamble, running data acquisition, controls, and information systems on the plant floor — Allen-Bradley PLCs, Honeywell controllers, and the custom software that tied them to the machines. We were building SCADA-class monitoring and control before it was a product you could buy. That's where a thread that still runs through my work began: real systems, integrated across messy boundaries, that have to actually work.
From there I founded LCG Technologies and grew it to 100 people and more than 200 clients across manufacturing, warehousing, insurance, healthcare, and government — running our own IT and security while delivering in heavily regulated, integration-heavy environments. Through LCG I served as lead architect and then acting CTO for Advertising.com from its founding, helping scale it toward roughly 600 million global unique visitors before its acquisition by AOL.
Building and scaling at the frontier
I joined the founding team of seven at Videology and built the technology organization for one of the world's largest video advertising platforms — growing engineering from two people to more than 150, and architecting the full stack. We started on hard servers and moved to AWS after two years in R&D, becoming among the earliest adopters — deploying when the only path to production was a command-line interface — and scaled to more than three billion transactions and four terabytes of data a day, through multiple acquisitions across nine offices worldwide.
I later served as CTO and Chief Architect of Levels Beyond, leading technology and product for a digital media platform used by major media, entertainment, sports, and gaming brands — later acquired by Signiant, after my tenure.
What I do now
Through HotRMC I work as a fractional and interim CTO for growth-stage companies — owning strategy, architecture, delivery, and the enterprise IT and security that keep it all running. Over the past year I've done an intensive, hands-on applied-AI build effort: shipping real applications and integrations while building with frontier, open-weight, and local models and agentic coding tools, primarily on AWS. That keeps me current enough to lead the modernization and AI calls that matter — from the inside, not the outside.
Across all of it, one thing hasn't changed: I stay hands-on, and I stay accountable.
Career at a glance
- Founder & CEO, Heart of the Rockies Management Consulting (HotRMC) — 2012–present
- CTO & Chief Architect, Levels Beyond (Reach Engine) — 2016–2019
- CTO & Chief Architect, Videology Group — 2007–2014
- Founder & CEO, LCG Technologies Corp. (acquired by private investor) — 1994–2010
- Lead Architect → CTO, Advertising.com (acquired by AOL) — 1997–2000, 2004-2006
- Controls & Information Systems Engineer, Procter & Gamble — 1986–1995
Education
- Cornell University — B.S., Electrical Engineering
- Georgia Institute of Technology — M.S., Computer Science (coursework, 4.0)
Want a clear read on where your technology stands?
Book a call and let's talk. Where it fits, I'll point you to the right starting point — often a Technology Diagnostic.