Who is Tom Smykowski?
Tom Smykowski is a remote Solutions Architect based in Poland, with nearly two decades of experience in product delivery, combining deep engineering, UX, and product thinking. He is the ideal partner for founders, CTOs, and executives in the EU, UK, and US who need ownership from initial discovery through to production deployment. His work focuses on solving complex architectural challenges, modernizing legacy systems, and building scalable, user-focused products from the ground up.
His career spans roles as a Staff Software Engineer at Croissant, where he partnered directly with the CEO and CTO on compliance and collaboration features for a workplace platform, and as a lead on the Printify design system rebrand ahead of its merger with Printful, impacting over 10 million merchants and a frontend engineering team of around 60. As the founder of Websoul, he built a fintech SaaS marketing automation platform serving 32,000+ businesses. This breadth of experience, from industrial ERP at Insoft Serwis to technical writing, ensures he approaches architecture with a holistic, business-outcome-focused mindset.
Tom specializes in remote collaboration with international teams, adept at navigating time zone differences with clear, asynchronous communication. He is available for full-time, part-time, and B2B contract engagements, bringing staff and senior-level engineering expertise directly to your project without the overhead of large consulting firms.
The Role of a Modern Solutions Architect
A modern Solutions Architect does more than draw diagrams. They are a strategic partner who translates business goals into a coherent, scalable, and maintainable technical reality. This involves deep collaboration with product managers, designers, engineers, and stakeholders to ensure the architecture supports both immediate needs and long-term growth. The role requires balancing technical constraints with user experience, performance, security, and cost.
For remote teams, this role is even more critical. A remote Solutions Architect must excel at written and verbal communication, documenting decisions clearly, and fostering alignment across distributed teams. They act as a bridge, ensuring that architectural vision is understood and implemented consistently, whether team members are in Europe, the UK, or on the US East Coast. This prevents fragmentation and technical debt, which can cripple a scaling product.
Tom embodies this modern approach. His work is not just about choosing technologies like Vue.js, TypeScript, or Supabase, but about designing systems that empower engineering teams. He focuses on creating clear boundaries, reusable components, and automated workflows that improve developer experience and productivity, which is especially valuable in a remote setting where spontaneous collaboration is less frequent.
Architecting for Scale and Modernization
Many companies face the challenge of scaling a successful MVP or modernizing a legacy monolith that can't support future growth. A Solutions Architect provides the blueprint for this transition. This involves assessing the current codebase, identifying bottlenecks, and designing an incremental migration path that minimizes risk and downtime. It's about evolutionary architecture, not a risky big-bang rewrite.
Tom has direct experience in these high-stakes scenarios. At Printify, he contributed to a major design system overhaul that unified the frontend experience for a massive merchant base, a critical step before a significant merger. At Fream, as lead frontend, he built design systems and map-based interfaces for industrial SaaS, focusing on conversion-optimized UX. For Websoul, he architected a full-stack fintech SaaS from scratch using Vue, TypeScript, Supabase, and AG Grid, handling complex data grids and real-time features.
His methodology includes rigorous code and architecture audits, performance profiling, and security reviews. He believes in leveraging existing assets where possible and making strategic, justifiable investments in new technology. This pragmatic approach ensures that architectural changes deliver tangible business value, whether measured in improved page load times, reduced server costs, increased team velocity, or enhanced user satisfaction.
Integrating AI and Future-Proofing Your Stack
Today's architectural decisions must account for the accelerating integration of artificial intelligence. A forward-thinking Solutions Architect considers how AI agents, LLMs, and automated workflows will interact with the system. This goes beyond simple API calls to OpenAI, encompassing an AI-native software development lifecycle, agentic engineering, and setting up AI software factories to boost team productivity.
Tom offers specialized consulting in this area, from AI strategy briefings for CEOs and CTOs to hands-on setup of AI coding agents like Cursor or GitHub Copilot within development teams. He helps establish quality gates, test automation, and AI-assisted workflows that can dramatically reduce time-to-market and improve code quality. This is particularly valuable for remote teams, where AI tooling can enhance asynchronous collaboration and knowledge sharing.
His approach is to embed AI capabilities thoughtfully into the architecture, ensuring they are secure, scalable, and maintainable. This might involve designing data pipelines for training, creating APIs for model inference, or structuring the codebase to be easily understood and extended by both human engineers and AI assistants. The goal is to future-proof your investment, making your team more agile and competitive.
Remote Collaboration and Leadership
Effective remote Solutions Architecture hinges on leadership and communication. The architect must inspire confidence, articulate complex trade-offs in simple terms, and foster a culture of technical excellence across the distributed team. This involves regular knowledge sharing through technical writing, workshops, webinars, and mentorship, all conducted remotely.
Tom's background as a technical writer, book author, and public speaker makes him exceptionally skilled at this. He can create clear architectural decision records (ADRs), conduct remote training sessions on new system patterns, and mentor engineers on best practices. His ability to overlap with US East Coast, UK, and EU time zones ensures he is available for synchronous meetings when needed, while his proficiency with async tools keeps projects moving forward efficiently.
He enjoys collaborating with founders and product leaders to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear technical roadmap. His remote work style is proactive, transparent, and focused on outcomes. He ensures that every member of the team, regardless of location, understands the architectural vision and their role in executing it, which is fundamental to the success of any remote engineering initiative.
When This is a Good Fit
Engaging Tom as your remote Solutions Architect is a strong fit if you are a founder, CTO, or executive leading a distributed team in the EU, UK, or US. It is ideal if you are building a new product from scratch and need an experienced hand to design a scalable foundation, or if you are modernizing an existing system that has become difficult to maintain and scale. It is also a perfect match if you are looking to integrate AI capabilities strategically into your product and development processes and need an architect who understands both the technological and human factors involved. His model is best for teams that value deep ownership, clear communication, and a product-minded approach to technical architecture.