Who is Tom Smykowski, Design System Engineer?
Tom Smykowski is a product-minded senior software engineer specializing in the architecture, development, and governance of scalable design systems. With nearly two decades of experience in product delivery, he is the ideal hire for organizations needing an engineer who combines deep technical implementation skills with UX and product thinking to create cohesive, accessible, and maintainable component libraries and design tokens. His work directly supports product teams in shipping faster with higher quality, making him a strategic asset for founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders.
Tom's expertise is proven in high-stakes environments. At Printify, he was instrumental in the design system and rebranding initiative ahead of the company's merger with Printful, a project supporting over 10 million merchants and approximately 60 frontend engineers. This work required not just coding components, but establishing patterns, documentation, and processes that scaled. Similarly, as Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, he partnered closely with the CEO and CTO on compliance and collaboration features, ensuring the design system evolved to support complex product needs. His background as founder of Websoul, which served 32,000+ businesses, further demonstrates his ability to own systems from discovery through production.
Based in Poland, Tom works remotely with international teams across the EU, UK, and US, including effective East Coast overlap. His engagement model is flexible, suitable for full-time roles, B2B contracts, or focused consulting engagements aimed at establishing or modernizing a design system foundation.
Strategic Impact of a Dedicated Design System Engineer
Hiring a dedicated design system engineer like Tom moves your organization from ad-hoc UI development to a strategic, product-led approach. A well-architected design system reduces cognitive load for developers, ensures brand consistency across all user touchpoints, and dramatically improves accessibility compliance. It transforms UI development from a repetitive, error-prone task into a leveraged activity where building new features becomes faster and more reliable. For growing companies, this is not a luxury. It is a critical infrastructure investment that pays dividends in developer velocity, product quality, and user satisfaction.
The return on investment manifests in several key areas. First, engineering teams spend less time debating patterns or fixing visual bugs and more time on unique business logic. Second, product and design teams gain confidence that their specifications will be implemented faithfully and consistently, whether the work is done in-house or by external contractors. Third, onboarding new engineers becomes significantly easier, as they have a single source of truth for all UI components and patterns. This is especially vital for distributed teams, where clear, documented systems replace the need for constant synchronous communication.
Tom's approach focuses on creating systems that are not just collections of components, but living ecosystems with clear governance, contribution models, and versioning strategies. He understands that a design system must serve both the designers who conceive the experiences and the engineers who build them, bridging the gap between these disciplines with technical precision and collaborative process.
Core Technical Skills for Design System Development
Building a robust design system requires a specialized blend of frontend mastery, architectural thinking, and tooling expertise. Tom's primary technical stack for this work centers on TypeScript, Vue.js, and React, providing the strong typing and component-model foundations necessary for reliable systems. His experience with tools like AG Grid for complex data tables and Supabase for full-stack capabilities means he understands how design system components must integrate with real-world data and application logic, not just static prototypes.
A critical technical dimension is the creation and management of design tokens. This involves defining a scalable system of color, spacing, typography, and other visual properties that can be consumed across web, mobile, and other platforms. Tom engineers these tokens to be dynamic, often supporting theming and mode switching (like light/dark), and ensures they are exported in formats usable by both design tools (like Figma) and all engineering frameworks in your stack. This technical plumbing is what makes a design system truly systematic and future-proof.
Beyond the UI layer, Tom emphasizes the developer experience (DevEx). This includes building comprehensive documentation with live examples, creating robust testing suites (unit, visual regression, accessibility), and integrating the system seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines. He sets up automated workflows for publishing package updates, changelog generation, and dependency management, ensuring the design system is a reliable product for its internal consumers: your engineering team.
From Legacy UI to a Modern Design System
Many organizations recognize the need for a design system only after accumulating years of inconsistent, legacy UI code. Modernizing this landscape is a complex challenge that requires careful strategy. Tom has led such transformations, most notably at Printify, where a rebrand and merger necessitated a unified frontend architecture. His process begins with a comprehensive audit of existing components, identifying duplication, inconsistencies, and accessibility gaps. This audit forms the basis for a phased migration plan that minimizes disruption to active product development.
The migration strategy often involves building the new system in parallel with the old, starting with foundational tokens and core components (buttons, inputs, typography). Tom establishes clear adoption pathways, such as providing codemods or wrapper components, to help teams incrementally migrate without requiring massive, risky rewrites. He prioritizes components based on usage frequency and impact, ensuring the highest ROI pieces are delivered first. This pragmatic, iterative approach builds momentum and demonstrates value early in the process.
Successful modernization also requires buy-in. Tom works as a facilitator between engineering, product, and design leadership to align on goals, timelines, and contribution models. He documents the cost of the current fragmentation in terms of developer hours and bug rates, making a data-driven case for investment. His experience with clients like GE Healthcare, Unilever, and Bunge shows he can navigate large, complex organizations and drive change through influence and demonstrated results.
Governance, Contribution, and Scaling Your System
A design system is not a one-time project. It is a long-lived product that requires ongoing governance to remain useful and avoid decay. Tom establishes lightweight but effective governance models that define how new components are proposed, designed, developed, and added to the system. This includes contribution guidelines, review processes (both design and code reviews), and versioning policies. He often sets up a cross-functional steering group with representatives from key product teams to ensure the system evolves to meet real needs.
As the system scales to serve dozens of engineers and multiple products, automation becomes key. Tom implements automated checks for accessibility (using tools like axe-core), visual regression testing (with tools like Chromatic or Percy), and bundle size analysis. He integrates these checks into pull request workflows, providing immediate feedback to contributors and maintaining quality without creating a bottleneck. Documentation is also automated where possible, with live examples generated from component code to ensure it never becomes outdated.
Finally, Tom focuses on metrics and communication. He helps teams track adoption rates, measures the impact on feature delivery speed, and reports on reduced bug counts in UI-related tickets. This continuous feedback loop proves the system's value and justifies ongoing investment. His remote, async-friendly working style is perfectly suited to maintaining these processes with distributed teams across different time zones, ensuring the design system remains a central, active hub for your product development.
When This is a Good Fit
Hiring Tom as your design system engineer is an excellent fit if you are a founder, CTO, or engineering leader at a scaling company where UI inconsistency is slowing down development or harming the user experience. It is ideal if you have a product team of 10+ engineers, are planning a rebrand or major product overhaul, or are building a new suite of products that need to share a common look and feel. It is also a strong fit if you need an experienced hand to modernize a fragmented legacy frontend, establish proper design token infrastructure, or mentor your team in design system best practices. His remote collaboration model works seamlessly with teams in the EU, UK, and US.