Work With Me

Senior Technical Leadership and Scaling Teams

Product Owner or CTO? Experiencing any of the following?

  • Features are taking longer to build
  • There’s so much unplanned work caused by unexpected bugs and your tests don’t give you much confidence in the stability of your product
  • You could drown yourself in the complexity of the code
  • Onboarding new developers takes a month
  • You think it might be time to rewrite everything.

My name is Rob Yurkowski. I’ve been a professional software developer since 2008 and a consultant since 2012. I’ve worked with exceptionally small, budget-limited clients whose projects were critical to their survival, up to Series-D-funded startups. These companies have varied in industry, including those in real estate, e-commerce, marketing, ‘quick’ commerce, health care, arts, and nutrition.

My expertise is in productivity and enablement — in helping companies conquer out-of-control complexity and get back to productivity.

What Does a Typical Month Look Like?

When I work with new long-term clients, the first month from me often can look something like this:

  • I read your onboarding material for engineers, and take notes about where there are gaps or problems. Then I fix the gaps.
  • No bootstrap script? I help set up a minimal Dockerfile or bash script to make sure it’s easy to run your application in isolation in development.
  • I work on comprehending and diagramming your domain model, generating notes on entities and creating ERDs as I go.
  • I update your README to document essential knowledge of your problem space, as well as unintuitive parts of your solution and application — the sort of stuff a new SVP Engineering would ask for on day one.
  • I ship a few features to understand how regular development works and feels.
  • If you don’t have decent telemetry and monitoring, I help set this up. Then I do a little bit of profiling to see where the biggest gains can be made.
  • I meet with members of your team to see where the biggest pain points are, and where it makes the most sense to focus on in order to boost your team.
  • All the while, I participate actively in code review, help chair technical meetings, and assist your engineers by bringing a principal-level and customer-focused perspective to the team.

I’m also available for more limited-term engagements on specific projects. If either sounds pretty great to you, let’s get together and plan our collaboration.

Set Up A Consultation

Select Past Clients

FastAF

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Technical Leadership and Process Creation / 3 month engagement

  • Led creation of engineering on-boarding and off-boarding procedure
  • Heavy focus on improving code review culture
  • Led high-stakes migration from GoodJob to Sidekiq
  • Introduced several architectural patterns to streamline and de-complicate workflows across the API app
HoodQ

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Principal Engineering / 2 year engagement

  • Led near-zero-downtime transition from EOL managed VMs to AWS Fargate, cutting monthly spend by more than 50% and increasing operational independence for engineering
  • Led decoupling of monolith on domain boundaries, creation of SOA / Evented architecture using RabbitMQ, and creation of new Accounts service
K-Rae Transportation

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Principal Engineering / on-going 8 year engagement

  • Developed greenfield operations-critical Trip Management System
  • Maintained and upgraded from Rails 3.1 to Rails 6.1 over the course of work