Hi everyone. My name is Rob Wierzbowski, and I'm looking for my next role.

The basics

I'm an engineer with over a decade of experience in frontend technology and tech leadership. I help organizations build strong products and teams by focusing on quality, resilience, mentorship, and making the best way to do things the easiest way to do things. I love working with collaborative and emotionally intelligent people on beautiful, usable products.

This post describes what engages me, where I make the most impact, and the environment I thrive in. If we sound like a match, you can contact me at rob.wierzbowski@gmail.com.

The role

A staff-level frontend engineering position on a product or platform team. Finding a team that shares a similar working style and definition of success, and provides opportunity to make a positive, visible impact is more important to me than the specifics of what I'm working on.

Keywords for the role might be: product and platform engineering, tech leadership, mentorship, design systems, developer experience, shared tools, large refactors, modernization, simplicity, success without ego, and cross-organization alignment.

Where

United States remote. I prefer to work with a team that's located in North American time zones. I’m also open to travel and partial in-office in Austin, Texas.

When

Interviewing now. Ideally I’d like to take a week or two between hire and start to ensure I come into the role centered and rested.

What I bring

I shine when taking the long view, building products, tools, and processes that fold a well-reasoned tech strategy into the day-to-day work of engineering teams.

I see value in staying on the leading edge of the technologies we're using, but I'm not attracted to new for the sake of new. Practicality always trumps novelty.

Simplicity is a virtue. I spend the time to make the letter shorter, and strive to deliver code and documents that seem clear and obvious (although we may have traveled through complexity to get there).

I believe the most important part of a technical leadership position is communication, whether it be through well formed code, documentation, or presentations to peers and stakeholders.

View my resume or Linkedin for some of the details, or better yet contact me and schedule a conversation.

What you bring

You’re focused on refining and modernizing your frontend systems and the ways your organization works together.

You have a strong product and design organization. You value product, design, and engineering equally, and encourage them to work together as peers to solve problems.

You work sustainably. You have the maturity to avoid crunches and overwork, and allow your employees the time off they need to maintain health and positivity.

You have women and people of color in senior and leadership roles. The company I work for has to look like the world I live in.

You offer compensation and benefits at a competitive rate. Salary, 401k match, insurance, and time off are especially important to me, although total comp makes up for the sum of its parts.

Although not necessary, you’ll move to the top of my list if you’re a larger company (500 to 5000 in the tech organization) or if you're a smaller company looking for an person to set technical direction for the frontend staff. I'm also partial to companies that are publicly traded or approaching IPO, and ones that have perks that show they value employees as humans with life outside of work.

Non-alignments

The following could make us a poor match. If these describe you, another candidate may be a better fit.

You're focused on military, government, blockchain, Web3, or EdTech products.

You don’t value and staff frontend-focused engineers. The frontend space is deep, and a staff of experts is required to build an industry leading product.

You expect my role to be on call more than once every quarter, especially for products I don't have day-to-day responsibility for.

A note on interviews

The interview process is a reflection of company culture. I look for interviews that allow me to communicate my expertise in leadership, problem solving, and technology. I love an interview where we talk about the organizational why and technical how of a feature set, pair on existing codebases, or use whiteboards and conversation to explore architecture and ways of working. Take home coding exercises where I can fully consider the requirements and edges of a prompt are especially effective.

Because of the breadth of responsibilities I've had over the past few years, Leetcode and speed focused exercises aren't an effective way for me to display what I bring to a company. If this is a step in your interview process I propose we replace it with a pairing or take home exercise where I can communicate the whys as well as hows, and deliver more realistic code than a rushed first draft. As a rule, I don't participate in technical interviews that are unrelated to the role (e.g., algorithm quizzes); these tend to be cultural and socioeconomic filters instead of a test of a candidate's relevant skills, and are harmful to our profession.

Thanks for reading. If you think we could be a good match, go ahead and send me a mail at rob.wierzbowski@gmail.com. Looking forward to hearing from you 👋🏼.