Who is Tom Smykowski?
Tom Smykowski is a Poland-based, remote full stack engineer contractor with nearly two decades of experience in product delivery, combining deep engineering, UX, and product thinking. He is the ideal hire for founders, CTOs, and executives seeking ownership from initial discovery through to production deployment for teams in the EU, UK, and US. His work focuses on turning complex requirements into maintainable, scalable, and user-focused products, making him a strategic contractor for staff, senior, or founding engineer engagements.
Operating remotely from Poland, Tom specializes in collaborating with international teams, offering significant overlap with EU, UK, and US East Coast time zones. His approach is built on a foundation of technical excellence and product-minded strategy, ensuring that engineering efforts directly align with business goals. This makes him not just a code contributor, but a force multiplier for product velocity and technical quality.
His career spans a wide array of industries and technical challenges, from building marketing automation platforms serving over 32,000 businesses to leading frontend efforts for industrial SaaS and contributing to platforms used by millions. This breadth ensures he can parachute into diverse project environments, understand the context quickly, and start delivering value from day one of a contract.
Proven Full Stack Contractor Experience
As a full stack engineer contractor, Tom has a track record of delivering complete product solutions. His tenure as Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, a workplace platform, involved a deep partnership with the CEO and CTO on compliance and collaboration features, showcasing his ability to operate at a strategic level while handling complex technical implementation. This role required a full-stack mindset, balancing backend logic, API design, and frontend user experience.
At Printify, he played a key role in the design system and rebrand ahead of its merger with Printful, work that scaled to support a community of over 10 million merchants and a frontend engineering team of around 60. This project demanded expertise in component architecture, developer tooling, and cross-team coordination, all hallmarks of a senior full stack contractor who can unify and elevate a codebase. His earlier work includes founding Websoul, where he built a fintech SaaS marketing automation platform from the ground up using Vue, TypeScript, Supabase, and AG Grid.
His experience extends to industrial domains as well, having served as the lead frontend engineer at Fream for an industrial SaaS product, where he built design systems, integrated complex mapping features, and focused on conversion-driven UX. This diversity proves his adaptability and depth as a contractor who can tackle both consumer-facing applications and complex B2B enterprise software.
Technical Stack and Modern Development
Tom's technical arsenal as a full stack contractor is centered on modern, productive technologies. He has extensive, hands-on expertise with Vue.js and TypeScript across the stack, utilizing them to build robust, type-safe applications. His work with Supabase demonstrates proficiency in backend-as-a-service and real-time database solutions, enabling rapid full-stack development without sacrificing scalability or security.
For data-intensive applications, he leverages AG Grid to deliver enterprise-grade data tables and grids. His focus on design systems ensures UI consistency and accelerates frontend development, while a strong commitment to accessibility guarantees products are usable by all. He is adept at API design and integration, connecting frontend applications to various backend services and third-party platforms.
Beyond these core technologies, he actively incorporates AI-assisted workflows into the development process, using tools like AI coding agents to boost productivity and maintain high code quality. This modern approach positions him as a contractor who not only builds with today's best tools but also actively shapes and improves the software development lifecycle for the teams he joins.
Contractor Engagement Models
Tom offers flexible engagement models tailored to the needs of international teams. He is available for full-time or part-time B2B contracts, providing dedicated engineering capacity. For project-based work, he operates as an independent contractor or freelancer, ideal for short-term initiatives or long-term collaborations. The contract-to-hire model is also an option for teams looking to evaluate a permanent fit.
For organizations needing strategic guidance without a full-time commitment, he provides fractional engineering and interim engineering leadership services. This is particularly valuable for startups or scale-ups that require seasoned technical direction as they grow. All these engagements are conducted remotely, with Tom collaborating seamlessly from Poland with teams across Europe, the UK, and North America.
He is also available for occasional on-site workshops, client visits, and team offsites, facilitating crucial in-person collaboration and planning sessions when needed. This hybrid remote model combines the flexibility and focus of distributed work with the high-bandwidth benefits of face-to-face interaction for key milestones.
From MVP to Scaling SaaS
Tom's contractor services cover the entire product lifecycle. For founders and startups, he excels at building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) from scratch, making rapid, informed technology choices and establishing a clean, scalable foundation. His product-minded engineering ensures the MVP is not just a proof-of-concept but a viable stepping stone toward a full-fledged product.
For established companies, he specializes in modernizing and scaling existing SaaS platforms. This includes refactoring monolithic architectures, implementing robust design systems, improving performance, and enhancing developer experience to support growing engineering teams. His work at Printify on the design system is a prime example of scaling infrastructure to support a large, fast-moving organization.
Whether the need is for Angular or React modernization, integrating AI capabilities into an existing product, or overhauling legacy code for better maintainability, Tom applies a systematic, ownership-driven approach. He doesn't just implement tickets, he architects solutions with long-term health and business goals in mind, ensuring that the investment in a contractor yields sustainable value.
AI Integration and Engineering Leadership
As a full stack contractor with a forward-looking skillset, Tom is adept at integrating Artificial Intelligence into software products. He can help teams adopt AI-native development practices, set up AI software factories with coding agents, and implement AI-assisted testing and quality gates. This expertise allows companies to leverage the latest advancements in AI to boost developer productivity and create smarter, more adaptive features.
His consulting services extend to AI strategy, technical due diligence, and corporate AI training for engineering teams, executives, and founders. He offers workshops, webinars, and executive briefings to upskill organizations on effectively leveraging AI in their software development lifecycle and product roadmap. This makes him a unique contractor who can both implement AI solutions and elevate the entire team's capability.
For roles requiring technical leadership, Tom operates as a staff-level contractor or fractional CTO. He provides architecture reviews, guides technical decision-making, mentors engineers, and establishes best practices around CI/CD, test automation, and developer productivity. This leadership is delivered in a hands-on, collaborative manner, directly contributing code while setting the technical vision.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as a full stack engineer contractor is an excellent fit if you are a founder, CTO, or executive leading a team in the EU, UK, or US and need a seasoned professional who can take ownership of complex product challenges. It is ideal for projects requiring a blend of hands-on full stack development, strategic product thinking, and technical leadership. If your goals include building an MVP from scratch, modernizing a legacy Angular or React application, scaling a SaaS platform, or integrating AI capabilities into your product, his expertise is directly relevant. This engagement is particularly valuable for remote or distributed teams seeking a reliable, communicative, and highly skilled contractor who can work independently while seamlessly collaborating across time zones to drive your product forward.