Comment by syntropo

20+ years building products, platforms, and distributed systems that remain understandable as they scale.

Location: Vermont, USA

Remote: Yes, happy to travel

Willing to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: TypeScript, Node.js/Deno, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, React, Elasticsearch, Databricks/Spark, FFmpeg

Résumé/CV: <https://en.masher.media/about.html>

Email: hn@masher.media

I've mostly been a first or founding engineer, owning and evolving end-to-end systems in fast-moving environments. I focus on high-throughput pipelines, messaging platforms, media processing, recommendation engines, and real-time infrastructure.

I also build real-time dashboards and browser-based tooling to observe, debug, and control these distributed systems, using local-first storage and media processing as well as real-time communication workflows. I design systems that remain understandable and resilient under load, retries, and partial failures.

Recent work:

- Built a messaging system delivering millions of emails and push notifications in minutes (retries, deliverability, observability)

- Deployed real-time pipelines and recommendation systems for tens of millions of users

- Launched a browser-based video editing and encoding platform using FFmpeg, Supabase, and AWS serverless

- Scaled event ingestion 100x to power analytics, experimentation, and targeting

I do my best work in small, product-focused teams where engineers stay close to production, communicate early about risks and tradeoffs, and work directly with customers to solve concrete problems.

Currently interested in full-time, part-time, or contract:

- Forward deployed engineering

- Founding or early engineering

- Platform and systems engineering

- Data engineering

Pragmatic about LLMs: effective for exploration, debugging, documentation, and tightly scoped implementation work when paired with strong engineering judgment and rigid testing.