Who is a Scale-Up Staff Engineer?
Tom Smykowski is a product-minded Staff Software Engineer with nearly two decades of experience in product delivery, combining deep engineering, UX, and product thinking. He is an ideal hire for founders, CTOs, and executives seeking a hands-on technical leader who takes ownership from discovery through production, specifically to navigate the unique challenges of a scaling company. His background includes pivotal roles at high-growth platforms like Croissant and Printify, where he delivered systems that supported rapid user and merchant expansion.
The transition from startup to scale-up introduces complex technical demands: evolving monoliths, establishing platform reliability, and building teams that can sustain growth. A Staff Engineer at this stage must bridge strategic vision with execution, ensuring the architecture supports not just today's features but tomorrow's scale. Tom's approach integrates technical debt management with forward-looking system design, focusing on maintainability, developer experience, and scalable patterns. This prevents the common scale-up pitfalls of system brittleness and slowed velocity.
Operating remotely from Poland, Tom collaborates seamlessly with international teams across EU, UK, and US time zones. His work style is built on clear communication, async collaboration, and a focus on outcomes. For a scale-up, this means integrating a senior technical force without geographical constraints, bringing seasoned perspective to your core engineering challenges while aligning with your business goals and product roadmap.
Technical Leadership for Scaling Platforms
At Croissant, a workplace platform, Tom served as Staff Software Engineer in a direct partnership with the CEO and CTO. His work focused on compliance and collaboration features critical for enterprise adoption, requiring systems that were both robust and adaptable. This experience is directly applicable to scale-ups where product-market fit is proven, and the focus shifts to hardening the platform, expanding feature sets, and serving a growing, often more demanding, customer base.
Earlier, at Printify, Tom contributed to a major design system and rebrand initiative ahead of a significant merger. Working within a frontend organization of roughly 60 engineers serving over 10 million merchants, he helped establish the foundational UI libraries and patterns that enabled consistent, efficient feature development at scale. This is a textbook example of Staff Engineer impact: creating leverage for the entire engineering organization through strategic tooling and standards.
As the founder of Websoul, Tom built a marketing automation and fintech SaaS platform used by over 32,000 businesses. From the ground up, he architected systems using Vue, TypeScript, Supabase, and AG Grid to handle complex data workflows and user interactions. This founder-level experience means he understands the business pressures of a scale-up intimately, from cost management to prioritization, and can make technical decisions that balance immediate needs with long-term strategic health.
Architecting for Growth and Maintainability
Scale-up engineering requires a deliberate shift from "making it work" to "making it work at scale, reliably, and efficiently." Tom's work spans the full stack, with a strong emphasis on design systems, APIs, and accessibility. At Fream, as Lead Frontend for an industrial SaaS product, he built design systems and map-based interfaces focused on conversion-driven UX. This focus on user-centric, performant interfaces is crucial for scale-ups looking to optimize user acquisition and retention.
A key challenge is managing technical debt accumulated during the rapid-iteration startup phase. Tom employs a pragmatic approach to refactoring and modernization, whether it's evolving an Angular monolith, introducing React, or integrating AI-assisted workflows to boost developer productivity. His methodology includes code and architecture audits, performance profiling, and establishing quality gates within CI/CD pipelines to ensure that growth does not come at the expense of stability.
His expertise extends to AI-Native SDLC and setting up AI Software Factories. For a scale-up, integrating AI coding agents, improving test automation, and upskilling teams on new tools can dramatically accelerate development cycles. Tom can guide the adoption of AI within engineering workflows, from Copilot integrations to more advanced agentic engineering setups, ensuring your team builds faster without sacrificing code quality or system understanding.
Collaborating with Founders and Cross-Functional Teams
Tom's best fit is collaborating directly with founders, CTOs, and executives. He thrives in environments where he can translate business objectives into technical strategy and then execute on that strategy. His nearly twenty years of experience mean he can anticipate scaling challenges, propose viable solutions, and communicate trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders. This alignment is vital for a scale-up where resources are carefully allocated, and every technical decision has a business impact.
He enjoys working with product managers, designers, and engineers to turn complex requirements into maintainable, user-focused products. His background includes technical writing and public speaking, which translates into excellent internal documentation, clear technical specifications, and effective mentoring of growing engineering teams. For a scale-up, this ability to disseminate knowledge and raise the bar for the entire team is as valuable as writing code.
Remote collaboration is a core strength. Based in Poland, Tom is adept at async communication and cross-time-zone collaboration, with availability for overlap with US East Coast, UK, and EU hours. He is also available for occasional on-site workshops, client visits, and team offsites. This flexible model allows scale-ups to tap into high-level expertise without the overhead of a full-time, co-located executive hire, making him ideal for B2B contracts or fractional technical leadership roles.
From MVP to Enterprise-Grade Systems
Tom's career trajectory showcases a progression through the exact stages a scale-up navigates. From building an MVP at Websoul serving thousands of businesses, to contributing to the massive scale of Printify's merchant platform, to addressing enterprise compliance at Croissant. This gives him a unique perspective on the entire lifecycle: what foundational choices pay off later, what shortcuts become prohibitive, and how to evolve systems gracefully.
His project portfolio includes work for marquee clients like DeLaval, Ordnance Survey, GE Healthcare, Unilever, and Bunge, often involving complex B2B SaaS, marketplace platforms, and industrial applications. These experiences involve integrating with legacy systems, handling large datasets, and meeting stringent regulatory or performance requirements, all common hurdles for scale-ups moving upmarket or into new verticals.
Whether the need is modernizing an existing Angular or React codebase, scaling backend APIs, implementing a new design system, or integrating AI capabilities, Tom takes an ownership mindset. He focuses on solutions that are not just technically sound but also sustainable for your team to maintain and extend, ensuring that the platform can support the next phase of your company's growth.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your Scale-Up Staff Engineer is a strong fit if you are a founder or CTO of a post-Series A company experiencing rapid growth. Your product-market fit is established, but your engineering systems are feeling the strain. You need a hands-on technical leader who can architect for the next order of magnitude, mentor your growing team, and work directly with leadership to align technology with business goals. You value remote-first collaboration and seek experienced expertise without enterprise consulting overhead to navigate the critical scale-up phase successfully.