Who is Tom Smykowski, Your Accessibility Engineer?
Tom Smykowski is a Poland-based, remote accessibility engineer with nearly two decades of product delivery experience, combining deep engineering expertise with UX and product thinking. He is the ideal hire for founders, CTOs, and executives seeking a staff or senior-level engineer who can take ownership of accessibility from discovery through to production, ensuring your digital products are inclusive, compliant, and deliver superior user experiences. His work bridges the gap between technical implementation and user-centric design, making him a strategic asset for teams building for a global audience.
His career is defined by a commitment to building products that work for everyone. From leading frontend development and design systems at scale to founding his own SaaS platform serving tens of thousands of businesses, Tom has consistently prioritized accessibility as a core component of quality engineering, not an afterthought. This approach is grounded in practical experience across industrial ERP systems, large-scale e-commerce platforms like Printify, and innovative workplace solutions like Croissant, where compliance and user collaboration were paramount.
Working remotely from Poland, Tom specializes in collaborating with international teams across the EU, UK, and US, including effective overlap with US East Coast time zones. His engagement model is flexible, encompassing full-time roles, B2B contracts, and project-based consulting. He is particularly adept at partnering with product managers, designers, and other engineers to translate complex accessibility requirements into maintainable, scalable code and sustainable processes.
Building Accessible Products at Scale
True accessibility engineering goes beyond checking boxes for WCAG guidelines. It involves architecting systems where inclusivity is a foundational principle. Tom's experience as a Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, a workplace platform, exemplifies this. In a partnership with the CEO and CTO, he was instrumental in building features that required strict compliance and seamless collaboration, ensuring the platform was usable by a diverse workforce with varying needs. This required a deep understanding of how accessibility intersects with real-world user workflows and business objectives.
Similarly, his work on the Printify design system ahead of its merger with Printful was a large-scale exercise in accessible frontend engineering. Tasked with supporting a rebrand for a platform serving over 10 million merchants and approximately 60 frontend engineers, Tom helped establish patterns and components that were not only visually consistent but also built with semantic HTML, proper ARIA attributes, and keyboard navigation from the start. This proactive approach prevented accessibility debt and empowered a large engineering team to build compliant features efficiently.
These experiences demonstrate a critical skill for any senior accessibility engineer, the ability to implement accessibility in a way that scales with the engineering organization. By embedding accessible patterns into design systems and establishing clear coding standards, Tom ensures that accessibility is a shared responsibility, reducing the burden on individual developers and creating a more resilient and inclusive product architecture.
Accessibility as a Product and Engineering Discipline
For Tom, accessibility is not a separate silo but an integral part of product engineering. His product-minded approach means he evaluates accessibility requirements through the lens of user value, business impact, and technical feasibility. This is crucial for leadership roles where you must advocate for accessibility investments and demonstrate their return, whether through expanded market reach, reduced legal risk, or improved overall user satisfaction that drives retention.
This discipline was honed through diverse projects for clients like GE Healthcare, Unilever, Bunge, and the Polish Tourism Organisation. In these contexts, accessibility requirements could range from ensuring diagnostic tools are usable in high-stress medical environments to making tourism information accessible to travelers with disabilities. Tom's ability to understand specific industry and user contexts allows him to implement solutions that are technically sound and contextually appropriate.
Furthermore, his background includes technical writing and public speaking, which translates into excellent documentation and knowledge-sharing abilities. He can clearly articulate the 'why' behind accessibility standards to stakeholders and create training materials or workshops to upskill engineering teams. This helps build a lasting culture of accessibility within an organization, ensuring its principles endure beyond a single audit or project.
Technical Implementation and Modern Tooling
On the technical front, Tom's expertise is grounded in modern web technologies that are essential for building accessible applications. His core stack includes Vue.js, TypeScript, and React, with extensive experience in creating robust design systems, full-stack applications with Supabase, and complex data interfaces using AG Grid. He understands how to leverage these tools to create accessible single-page applications (SPAs), ensuring dynamic content is properly announced by screen readers and that focus management is handled correctly.
His work as the founder of Websoul, a marketing automation and fintech SaaS used by over 32,000 businesses, required building a highly interactive and data-intensive application that remained accessible. Using Vue, TypeScript, and Supabase, he architected a system where complex data tables and automation workflows were operable via keyboard and understandable with assistive technologies. This hands-on experience with building a product from scratch means he understands the entire lifecycle of accessibility, from initial HTML semantics to ongoing maintenance and user feedback integration.
Tom also stays current with AI-assisted development workflows, using tools like Claude Code and Cursor to enhance productivity. He applies this to accessibility by leveraging AI for automated testing suggestions, code pattern generation that follows accessibility best practices, and auditing assistance. This allows him to work efficiently while maintaining a high standard of compliance, blending human expertise with automated validation to cover more ground.
Why Hire a Remote Accessibility Specialist from Poland?
Hiring a dedicated accessibility engineer like Tom remotely from Poland offers distinct advantages for EU, UK, and US-based teams. Firstly, it provides access to a high level of senior engineering expertise often at a more sustainable cost structure than local hires in major tech hubs, without compromising on quality or experience. Tom's nearly two decades of experience bring a depth of knowledge that can accelerate your accessibility initiatives and mentor your existing team.
Secondly, Poland's central European location allows for convenient time-zone overlap with both Western Europe and the East Coast of the United States. This facilitates synchronous collaboration for planning sessions, pair programming, and stakeholder meetings while also supporting effective asynchronous communication. Tom is adept at working in distributed, cross-time-zone environments, ensuring projects move forward smoothly regardless of location.
Finally, Tom's international client portfolio, which includes names like Ordnance Survey, Base Camp, and the Silesian University of Technology, demonstrates his proven ability to integrate seamlessly into diverse organizational cultures and project methodologies. He brings not just technical skills but also the soft skills necessary for remote collaboration, clear communication, and autonomous ownership. This makes him a reliable, long-term partner for your engineering team's accessibility goals.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your accessibility engineer is an excellent fit if you are a founder, CTO, or product leader who needs to build or significantly improve the accessibility of a web application. It is ideal for teams that lack in-house expertise and need a senior engineer to establish foundations, for projects facing compliance deadlines, or for companies wishing to proactively build more inclusive products. If you value a product-minded engineer who can own the outcome from architecture to production and effectively collaborate with your remote team across the EU, UK, or US, then this collaboration will deliver strong results.