Who is This Backend Developer for Hire?
Tom Smykowski is a senior backend developer for hire 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 remote engineer who can take full ownership from technical discovery through to production. Based in Poland, he specializes in building and modernizing backend systems for international teams across the EU, UK, and US, ensuring robust, scalable, and maintainable architectures.
His career is defined by a focus on solving complex problems at scale. Whether it's designing high-performance APIs, integrating AI workflows, or modernizing legacy systems, Tom approaches backend development with a product-first mindset. This means every technical decision is evaluated not just for its elegance or performance, but for how it serves the end-user and advances business goals. For companies looking to hire a backend developer who bridges the gap between pure coding and strategic product delivery, Tom offers a rare combination of hands-on skill and leadership.
Tom's remote working model is optimized for cross-time-zone collaboration, making him a seamless fit for distributed teams. He is available for full-time, part-time, and B2B contract engagements, bringing staff or senior-level engineering to your project without the overhead of traditional enterprise consulting. His work with marquee clients like Croissant, Printify, and GE Healthcare demonstrates his ability to deliver in high-stakes, complex environments.
Core Backend Engineering Expertise
Tom's backend engineering expertise spans the full lifecycle of product development. He excels at architecting systems from the ground up, selecting the right technologies for scalability and maintainability, and then leading the implementation. His experience includes designing APIs that serve millions of requests, building secure authentication and authorization layers, and creating data models that evolve with product needs.
A significant portion of his work involves modernizing existing backend infrastructures. He has a proven track record of refactoring monolithic applications into microservices, improving database performance, and implementing CI/CD pipelines that enhance developer productivity and system reliability. This is not just about writing code, it's about improving the entire software delivery process to enable faster, safer iterations.
Furthermore, Tom integrates modern practices like AI-assisted development and agentic workflows into the backend engineering lifecycle. He helps teams adopt tools and processes that accelerate development without sacrificing quality. His focus is always on creating backend systems that are not only powerful and efficient but also a joy for other engineers to build upon and maintain.
Building Scalable Systems for Global Teams
Working remotely from Poland with teams across Europe, the UK, and North America has honed Tom's ability to build backend systems that are inherently scalable and globally accessible. He understands the technical challenges of serving users in different regions, such as latency, data residency, and compliance. His architecture decisions always consider these factors from the outset.
For instance, at Croissant, as a Staff Software Engineer, he worked on compliance and collaboration features critical for a workplace platform used by international teams. This required a backend that could handle complex permissioning, data synchronization, and real-time updates reliably at scale. Similarly, his work for Printify involved backend systems supporting a marketplace of over 10 million merchants, demanding high availability and robust API design.
Tom's approach emphasizes clean contracts between services, comprehensive monitoring, and proactive performance optimization. He builds systems with observability in mind, ensuring that issues can be diagnosed and resolved quickly, even when the engineering team is distributed across multiple time zones. This results in resilient backends that support business growth without constant firefighting.
AI Integration and Modern Backend Development
A key differentiator for Tom as a backend developer for hire is his focus on AI-native development and integration. He goes beyond simply calling an LLM API, instead architecting backend systems where AI is a core, intelligent component of the application logic. This includes designing agentic workflows, implementing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and building robust evaluation and quality gates for AI-generated outputs.
He advises on and sets up what he terms "AI Software Factories" - development environments and CI/CD processes optimized for AI-assisted coding, testing, and deployment. This can dramatically improve team velocity and code quality. For backend systems, this might mean automating API documentation generation, creating intelligent test suites, or building agents that assist with database optimization and migration scripts.
Tom is also skilled at integrating established AI services into backend workflows for tasks like content moderation, data enrichment, predictive analytics, and personalized user experiences. He understands the trade-offs between building custom models and leveraging third-party APIs, always aligning the technical approach with product requirements and cost considerations.
From Technical Leadership to Hands-On Coding
As a backend developer operating at a staff or senior level, Tom seamlessly transitions between high-level technical leadership and deep, hands-on coding. He is adept at working with founders and CTOs to translate business vision into a technical roadmap, then leading a team or working independently to execute it. This full-spectrum ownership is what makes him particularly valuable for startups and scaling companies.
His leadership manifests in setting coding standards, conducting architecture reviews, and mentoring other engineers. He fosters a culture of quality and continuous improvement. However, he remains deeply involved in the codebase, whether it's designing a critical database schema, troubleshooting a complex performance issue, or writing the core logic for a new microservice. This hands-on approach ensures that architectural decisions are grounded in practical reality.
Tom's communication style is clear and collaborative, essential for remote work. He documents decisions thoroughly, writes clear technical specifications, and is proactive in async communication. This ensures alignment across distributed teams and makes knowledge transfer smooth, reducing bus factor risk on critical backend systems.
Proven Delivery Across Industries
Tom's backend development experience is not confined to a single sector. He has delivered robust systems across a diverse range of industries, from industrial SaaS and fintech to e-commerce, healthcare, and public sector projects. This breadth of experience means he can quickly understand unique domain challenges and design appropriate technical solutions.
For Fream, he led frontend and backend work on industrial SaaS applications involving complex data visualization and mapping. At Websoul, which he founded, he built the backend for a marketing automation and fintech SaaS platform serving over 32,000 businesses, handling transactions, user data, and automation workflows. Earlier in his career at Insoft Serwis, he worked on industrial ERP systems, giving him a solid foundation in business logic and data integrity.
This varied background equips him to adapt best practices from one industry to another. Whether the priority is ultra-high reliability for healthcare data (GE Healthcare), scalability for a global marketplace (Printify), or compliance for enterprise collaboration (Croissant), Tom has firsthand experience designing backends to meet those specific, demanding standards.
When This is a Good Fit
Hiring Tom as your backend developer is an excellent fit if you need a senior or staff-level engineer who can own the backend architecture and implementation for a critical product. This is ideal for startups seeking a founding engineer, scale-ups needing to modernize and scale their infrastructure, or established companies looking for expert, temporary leadership on a key project. It's a perfect match if you value a product-minded approach, clear communication, and a professional who works seamlessly across time zones from Poland.