👋 I am a Software Engineer and Engineering Leader looking for an impactful role in a human-friendly, mission-driven product company.
jani.evakallio
jevakallio
jevakallio
jevakallio
jevakallioAbout me
I am a product engineer with 15+ years of professional experience building web and mobile applications across various architectures in cloud and serverless environments.
I have a proven track record assembling and managing happy, cohesive and high-performing engineering teams. I’ve grown into a manager in progressive people-first companies, and I have experience making good teams great.
I love building tools to make teams and developers more effective.
I believe in fostering communities online and offline. I speak at conferences, run meetups, teach workshops, and contribute to open source software projects.
Most importantly I do my best to be a decent, empathetic human being who’s fun to work with. In my free time I perform improv and stand-up comedy, write fiction, and pursue other creative endeavours.
About you
You are a mission-driven product company with an ethical business model. You’re most likely in consumer products or development tooling space.
You value diversity, inclusion and your employees’ autonomy. You care about the social and human impact of your product, and understand that user needs are as important as business goals, if not more so.
You’re based in London or fully remote.
What I can do for you
I've traveled down both management and technical tracks, and now I am primarily interested in senior individual contributor roles, or technical leadership roles with a strong hands-on development component. Here are some of the things I can do for you.
Architect and implement modern, high-quality web and mobile applications and backend systems, combining good programming practices and latest tools and technologies.
Apply Design Thinking and Agile Software Engineering methodologies to run the product development lifecycle from conception to production.
Build and lead engineering teams with a focus on diversity & inclusion and a fun and sustainable work environment, leveraging my network and developer advocacy experience in hiring.
I'm available primarily on contract, but open to discussing FTE positions in the right role in the right company.
Technologies
I am highly effective in architecting and engineering web applications using Modern JavaScript, and associated Web ecosystem standards, tools and practices.
My preferred tool for building user experiences is React, either as SSR, SSG, or SPA applications. I've built and shipped multiple apps for iOS and Android using React Native.
I have a strong preference for working in statically typed compile-to-JavaScript languages such as TypeScript, Flow and Rescript.
I love designing UI/UX in Figma, building out UIs with CSS-in-JS libraries, Utility-first CSS approaches like Tailwind, and deploying designs at scale using design systems and pattern libraries.
I have experience building and scaling end-to-end type-safe real-time systems using Node, GraphQL, gRPC, prisma, and CRDTs such as Y.js on the server, and using with tools like Apollo, Relay and urql on the client.
Configuring webpack is not my favorite hobby, but I can make it do what is needed, along with tools like esbuild, Vite, Rollup, Babel, and ASTs.
As a full-stack developer I have built and deployed resilient, large-scale services to AWS, GCP and Cloudflare in containerised, serverless, edge, and PaaS environments.
I have a solid grasp of software engineering fundamentals such as functional and object-oriented programming paradigms, database design, and systems architecture.
I’m also keen to learn new things. Currently, I'm diving deeper into real-time, distributed, serverless, and edge computing.
CV
PartyKit
CTO (July 2023 - November 2023)
verb.ai
Founding Engineer (October 2021 - June 2023)
Built out the initial product and engineering team for a novel LLM-assisted professional writing assistant.
Freelance
Startups (Full-time, September 2020 -)
Helping startups build products and organizations. Developing full-stack go-to-market MVPs. Scaling existing development teams, processes, and architectures.
References available upon request.
Major League Hacking
Open Source Mentor (Full-time, Remote, June-August 2020)
Led and supported a team of 20 international students contributing to open source projects such as React, React Native, Relay and Jest as part of the MLH Open Source Fellowship program.
Formidable
Vice President Engineering (London, 2016-2019)
I founded Formidable's UK/EU office, and in three years built it from ground up into a profitable multi-million dollar company. I was responsible for the entire consulting business lifecycle from client acquisition and recruitment to successful delivery.
I hired and managed a high-performing team of engineers with a focus on the team's personal and professional growth and work/life balance. I cultivated a culture of of learning, quality, innovation, autonomy and ownership, and maintained a near-100% employee retention over three years.
I worked in various client-facing roles as a consultant, project tech lead and solutions architect, and wrote tons of React, React Native and GraphQL code.
Futurice
Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead (London, 2014-2016)
As a senior full-stack engineer, I typically worked as a customer-facing project lead, developing web and mobile applications with React and React Native on the frontend, and Node.js or Clojure on the backend.
I am a Certified Scrum Master, and in addition to building products, I focused on helping teams work effectively. As the most senior developer in our London office, I coached teams, mentored junior developers, and provided training and specialist consultancy to other Futurice projects across Europe.
Fifth Element
Lead Developer (Helsinki, 2011-2014)
I was the lead developer of the company’s flagship product LogForce, a suite of JavaScript-based web, mobile and hybrid desktop apps for increasing the productivity of Finnish forest industry logistics.
Aditro
Software Engineer (Helsinki, 2009-2011)
I developed the company’s CRM system, SharePoint-based extranet portal, public website and marketing campaigns, mainly using ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC and legacy systems.
A.P. Møller Mærsk
SAP Business Warehouse Developer (Copenhagen, 2007-2009)
I worked with the SAP Business Warehouse product, developing web interfaces and KPI dashboards on top of business intelligence data.
Freelance Web Designer
Self-employed, part time (Helsinki, 2001-2007)
I put myself through school doing part-time web development and graphic design, mostly simple HTML/CSS-based websites for small businesses. Thank god nobody in Finland had yet heard of Wordpress, or I would’ve been out of a job.
Open source
Here are a few selected open source projects I've created.
Persistent Redux store for Offline-First applications, with first-class support for optimistic UI.
The first popular React Native starter kit, focused on functional programming, immutable state, and other good practices of its time.
Great for live coding presentations, impressing your friends, or just trying to look busy at work.
Communicate important updates to your team via git commit messages
A Jest Reporter to group, hide and prettify spammy console warnings
Run your web app inside VS Code
Talks
A few conference talks from over the years.
Building AI-Enhanced User Interfaces
jsday, Italy, 2023
Exploring UX patterns of human-machine collaboration in AI-augmented applications, and how to build them for the web leveraging real-time collaboration technologies such as CRDTs and Rich Text Editors.
This is a Talk About You
React Native EU, Poland 2018
A dystopian tale of your life as a software engineer accompanied by music and illustrations. By far the weirdest, and most popular talk I’ve ever done.
Writing Code like a Real Hacker
Reactivate X, London, 2018
A comedy lightning talk about how I built a VS Code extension to make myself a 10x engineer. This is by far the least prepared, and at 400k+ views, the most seen talk I’ve ever given.
Good Enough Still Isn’t Good Enough
Chain React, Portland, Oregon, 2018
A call to arms for UI engineers to harness the power of new, more productive technologies in order to improve the lives of our users, not only our companies’ bottom line.
This talk is targeted for React Native developers, but relevant for all UI engineers.
Offline for the Greater Good
React London, 2017
An overview of how and why to build offline-first applications with React and Redux, ending with a release of a new open source project, redux-offline.
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