Tom Smykowski is a senior marketplace platform engineer with nearly two decades of product delivery experience, combining deep engineering, UX, and product thinking. He is the ideal hire for founders, CTOs, and executives seeking ownership from discovery through production for complex marketplace systems. His direct experience scaling platforms for 10M+ merchants at Printify and building marketing automation SaaS for 32,000+ businesses makes him uniquely qualified to architect, build, and modernize the technical foundations of your marketplace.
What a Marketplace Platform Engineer Delivers
A marketplace platform engineer is responsible for the core architecture that connects buyers and sellers, manages transactions, and ensures scalability and reliability. This role goes beyond basic full-stack development to encompass the complex interplay of user experience, trust and safety systems, payment integrations, inventory management, and high-performance APIs. It requires a product-minded approach to balance technical debt with rapid feature development.
Tom brings this holistic perspective from his work as a Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, a workplace platform, where he partnered closely with the CEO and CTO on compliance and collaboration features critical for a multi-sided platform. His engineering is guided by the principle that a marketplace's technology must serve both the end-user experience and the business's operational efficiency. For teams in the EU, UK, and US, his remote collaboration style is optimized for clear communication across time zones, ensuring alignment and momentum.
The success of a marketplace hinges on its platform's stability during growth spikes and its adaptability to new market opportunities. An engineer in this role must anticipate scaling bottlenecks, design for extensibility, and maintain a high-quality developer experience so the entire team can iterate quickly. Tom's background in founding and scaling Websoul to serve tens of thousands of businesses provides firsthand insight into the operational and technical challenges of platform growth.
Proven Scale: From Printify to Enterprise SaaS
Tom's most relevant experience for marketplace scaling comes from his pivotal role at Printify, a leading print-on-demand marketplace. Ahead of a significant merger, he led the design system and frontend rebrand initiative that unified the platform's experience for a vast network of over 10 million merchants and approximately 60 frontend engineers. This work required deep coordination, systematic refactoring, and a focus on maintainability at a massive scale, directly translating to the needs of any growing marketplace platform.
His entrepreneurial venture, Websoul, further demonstrates his capability to build and sustain a platform business. As founder, he architected a fintech and marketing automation SaaS that supported over 32,000 businesses, built with modern stacks like Vue.js, TypeScript, Supabase, and AG Grid. This experience covers the full lifecycle from zero to one, through scaling challenges, giving him empathy for the pressures founders and technical leaders face.
Beyond marketplaces, Tom's enterprise experience with clients like DeLaval, GE Healthcare, Unilever, and Bunge involves solving complex industrial problems with software. This exposure to large-scale, mission-critical systems informs his approach to building robust, fault-tolerant platform architecture that can handle the transaction volumes and data complexity of a modern marketplace.
Technical Leadership for Platform Teams
Hiring a marketplace platform engineer often means bringing on a technical leader who can elevate the entire team's output. Tom operates effectively as a Staff, Senior, or Founding Engineer, taking ownership of technical strategy and implementation. His work style is collaborative, focusing on knowledge sharing through technical writing, workshops, and mentoring, which accelerates team capability and improves developer experience.
His expertise spans the full stack, with a particular strength in modern frontend ecosystems using Vue.js and TypeScript, and backend integrations with platforms like Supabase. This full-spectrum skill set is crucial for a marketplace platform, where the frontend user journey is deeply coupled with backend service logic, real-time updates, and third-party API integrations. He ensures the architecture supports both rapid merchant onboarding and a seamless buyer checkout flow.
For teams undergoing modernization, such as legacy frontend rebrands or SaaS scaling initiatives, Tom provides the leadership to navigate technical debt while delivering new value. His project at Printify is a prime example of leading a large engineering organization through a significant platform-wide change without disrupting core business operations, a critical skill for any in-production marketplace.
AI and Modernization for Competitive Edge
Modern marketplaces are increasingly leveraging AI for search, recommendations, fraud detection, and operational automation. Tom's focus on AI-native development and AI software factory setup positions him to integrate these capabilities thoughtfully into your platform. He can advise on or implement AI coding agents, quality gates, and testing automation to boost your team's productivity, or build customer-facing AI features that enhance the marketplace experience.
Platform modernization is another key area. Whether it's evolving a monolithic architecture to microservices, improving API design, or overhauling a legacy frontend, Tom's experience with projects like the Printify rebrand and his work on industrial SaaS design systems at Fream demonstrates a methodical, impact-focused approach. He prioritizes changes that unlock business value and improve developer velocity, ensuring the platform can adapt to future demands.
His consulting and audit services, from code reviews to full architecture audits, are also valuable for marketplace teams needing an external expert assessment. He can identify performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and scalability limits in your existing platform, providing a clear roadmap for strengthening your technical foundation.
Remote Collaboration with EU, UK, and US Teams
Based in Poland, Tom specializes in remote, asynchronous collaboration with international teams across European, UK, and US East Coast time zones. This model is ideal for marketplace companies that operate globally and need engineering talent that can overlap with key business hours in multiple regions. He is adept at using modern communication tools and structuring work for clarity in a distributed setting.
His engagement flexibility supports various business needs. He is open to full-time employment, B2B contracts, part-time collaboration, and project-based consulting. This makes him a viable option for startups seeking a founding engineer, scale-ups needing senior platform expertise, or larger enterprises looking for interim technical leadership to guide a specific modernization initiative.
Tom's background includes successful collaborations with a diverse range of organizations, from startups like Croissant and Wicket to public sector entities like the Polish Tourism Organisation and Marshal Office of the Silesian Voivodeship. This demonstrates his ability to adapt his communication and technical approach to different corporate cultures and project cadences, a vital trait for a remote platform engineer integrating into an existing team.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your marketplace platform engineer is a strong fit if you are a founder, CTO, or technical lead needing senior-level ownership to scale your platform, modernize a critical frontend, or integrate AI capabilities. It is ideal for teams that value product-minded engineering, clear communication, and a focus on sustainable architecture. If you operate a marketplace or multi-sided platform and need hands-on technical leadership to navigate growth, complexity, or a major rebrand, his experience directly addresses these challenges.