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: No

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'm a first/founding engineer by background, and lately I've been taking on contract work that draws on that same skill set: helping teams figure out what to build and how, before committing engineering time to it. I'm comfortable owning a problem end-to-end, from initial scoping through architecture and into a working v1, and I communicate clearly about scope, risk, and tradeoffs along the way.

Good fits for contract work:

- Technical scoping and planning for a new product or platform before a team commits resources to it

- Architecture review and systems modeling, mapping out how a system should be structured, where the risk is, and what tradeoffs matter

- Greenfield builds where you need someone to plan and ship v1 without much hand-holding

- Forward-deployed engineering, embedding with your team or your customer's to take a project from spec to delivery

Recent relevant 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 work best when I can talk directly to whoever owns the problem, and I'm glad to start with a short, well-scoped first deliverable if that's an easier way to size up a fit.

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