Tom Smykowski is a product-minded REST API engineer with nearly two decades of experience in software delivery, specializing in designing, building, and integrating robust APIs for web and mobile applications. Hiring Tom means engaging a senior engineer who takes ownership from initial discovery and architecture through to production deployment and maintenance, ensuring your API strategy aligns with business goals and user needs. He is an ideal fit for founders, CTOs, and executives looking for staff or senior-level expertise to lead API initiatives, modernize legacy systems, or scale SaaS platforms.
Architecting Scalable and Maintainable REST APIs
Building a REST API that stands the test of time requires more than just implementing endpoints. It demands a thoughtful approach to resource modeling, state management, and adherence to RESTful principles. Tom approaches API design with a product mindset, ensuring the interface is intuitive for both internal developers and external consumers, while maintaining the flexibility to evolve alongside your product.
His experience spans from creating greenfield APIs for startups to refactoring and extending complex enterprise systems. For instance, at Croissant, as a Staff Software Engineer, he worked on compliance and collaboration features within a workplace platform, which involved designing secure, reliable APIs that handled sensitive user data. This background ensures he understands the critical balance between innovation, security, and reliability in API development.
Tom focuses on creating APIs that are not only functional but also well-documented and easy to consume. He emphasizes clear status code usage, predictable error handling, and consistent pagination and filtering patterns. This discipline reduces integration friction and accelerates development for any team consuming the API, whether they are building a frontend application or integrating a third-party service.
Full-Stack Integration and Backend Development
A powerful REST API is often the backbone of a full-stack application, connecting sophisticated frontends to databases and external services. Tom's expertise extends across the stack, allowing him to design APIs that are optimized for the specific needs of the frontend client, whether it's built with Angular, React, or Vue.js. This holistic view prevents common pitfalls like over-fetching or under-fetching data and ensures optimal performance.
His work with companies like Printify, which serves over 10 million merchants, involved backend systems supporting a large-scale design system and rebrand. This required building and maintaining APIs that could handle high traffic and complex data relationships reliably. Similarly, as the founder of Websoul, a marketing automation platform serving 32,000+ businesses, he architected the entire backend, including fintech SaaS features, using technologies like TypeScript and Supabase.
Tom is proficient in selecting and integrating the right backend technologies, from traditional Node.js and Express setups to modern platforms like Supabase, ensuring data persistence, authentication, and business logic are implemented securely and efficiently. He understands that a well-designed API is a catalyst for frontend velocity and overall product success.
API Security, Performance, and Compliance
In today's digital landscape, API security is non-negotiable. Tom prioritizes building secure APIs from the ground up, implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, validating and sanitizing all inputs, and ensuring data is encrypted in transit and at rest. His work in compliance-heavy environments, such as at Croissant, has given him direct experience with data protection regulations relevant to EU, UK, and US markets.
Performance is another critical pillar. Tom engineers APIs for low latency and high throughput, employing techniques like intelligent caching strategies, database query optimization, and connection pooling. He conducts thorough performance testing to identify bottlenecks under load, ensuring the API remains responsive as user numbers grow. This focus on performance is crucial for user retention and satisfaction.
Furthermore, he ensures APIs are built with observability in mind, integrating comprehensive logging, monitoring, and alerting. This allows for proactive issue detection and swift resolution, minimizing downtime and maintaining a high quality of service for all API consumers.
Modernizing Legacy Systems and API Versioning
Many organizations grapple with legacy monolithic systems where APIs are tangled and difficult to maintain. Tom excels at modernizing these systems, incrementally refactoring and extracting well-defined REST APIs. This process improves developer experience, enables faster feature development, and paves the way for a more scalable microservices architecture if needed.
A key challenge in API evolution is managing change without breaking existing clients. Tom employs strategic versioning techniques, from URI versioning to using custom media types or headers, to introduce new features and deprecate old ones gracefully. He creates clear migration paths and comprehensive documentation to guide consumers through updates, minimizing disruption.
His experience includes working on large-scale systems for clients like GE Healthcare, Unilever, and Bunge, where careful, phased modernization was essential to maintaining business continuity. He brings this disciplined, low-risk approach to every API modernization project.
Collaboration and Remote Work with International Teams
Tom is based in Poland and works remotely with teams across the EU, UK, and US, including US East Coast overlap. He is adept at asynchronous communication and cross-time-zone collaboration, making him a seamless addition to distributed engineering teams. His ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly is bolstered by his background in technical writing and public speaking.
He thrives in collaborative environments, partnering closely with product managers to translate business requirements into technical specs, with designers to ensure API capabilities support the intended user experience, and with other engineers to establish best practices. He views the API as a primary product interface and advocates for its design to be a shared, deliberate effort.
Tom is available for various engagement models, including full-time, part-time, and B2B contracts, offering the flexibility to match your project's needs and timeline. His remote work style is proactive, organized, and focused on delivering tangible value through well-engineered APIs.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your REST API engineer is a strong fit if you need senior or staff-level ownership of your API layer. This is ideal for startups building their first API, scale-ups needing to refactor for growth, or enterprises modernizing legacy systems. It's a perfect match if you value a product-minded engineer who bridges technical execution with business strategy and can work effectively in a remote, cross-cultural setting with teams in the EU, UK, or US.