engineering brief // calm systems in noisy domains

Calm systems. Clear ownership. Teams that scale without heroics.

I’m Jedrzej Nowak, usually called NJ. I’ve spent most of my career in places where failure is expensive: telecom, cloud platforms, blockchain, and now AI. I help companies turn technical ambition into systems and teams that keep working when things get real.

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  • Remote-first long before it was fashionable
  • Trusted with distributed teams and high-stakes systems
  • Most useful where architecture, operations, and org design overlap

systems

architecture, failure modes, and recovery paths

teams

clear ownership, calmer execution, better handoffs

reliability

operational discipline without ceremony or drama

delivery

moving from prototype energy to something durable

operating model

How I lead when the work is ambiguous, technical, and under pressure.

I’m not interested in looking important from a distance. I’m useful when a company needs architectural clarity, a steadier engineering system, and someone who can stay close to the problem without becoming the bottleneck.

01

Close enough to help, far enough not to suffocate

I like joining design reviews, incident work, and hard delivery conversations when it meaningfully improves outcomes. Then I step back so the team can keep ownership.

02

Product, platform, and people are one system

I look at org friction and technical friction together. Slow teams often have structural problems, not motivation problems.

03

Geeky, but not doctrinaire

I care about solid design, but not as theatre. If the right answer is boring, pragmatic, and maintainable, I will take that every time.

selected work

Places where I helped make the system calmer and more usable.

The pattern is usually the same: too much ambiguity, too much operational drag, or a team carrying more cognitive load than it should. My best work is reducing that load without flattening ambition.

platform

Reduced infrastructure drag without making the system brittle

Reworked platform footprint, matched workloads to better-fit environments, and brought operating costs under tighter control while keeping reliability expectations intact.

  • bare metal and cloud rationalization
  • cost discipline tied to service quality
  • less waste, fewer surprises

org

Gave distributed teams a clearer operating model

Helped remote engineers work with better ownership, healthier handoffs, and less needless coordination overhead.

prod

Stayed close to production-scale systems

Worked on systems with real operational burden, where architecture decisions had to hold up under continuous use and scrutiny.

ops

Improved reliability in environments that punish sloppiness

Supported telecom, infrastructure, and blockchain work where incident quality and recovery mattered more than polished narratives.

principles under load

Defaults I keep reaching for when systems get messy.

  1. Design for recovery, not imagined perfection

    Failure will happen. Good systems make recovery legible: clear ownership, boring runbooks, realistic SLOs, and architecture that does not require superheroes.

  2. Push authority toward the team doing the work

    Teams move faster when decision rights are explicit. I provide context, pressure-test options, and clear obstacles. I do not try to centralize every choice.

  3. Measure the operational truth

    Slide-friendly metrics are not enough. I care about cycle time, incident quality, deployment confidence, retention, and whether the architecture is getting easier to change.

  4. Choose tools for fitness, not identity

    The goal is not to signal taste. The goal is to build an engineering system that a tired, competent maintainer can understand and extend six months later.

timeline

Recent chapters and the kind of problems I was trusted with.

2025 → now

Founding Engineer · Stealth AI Startup

new product and team shape

Building product from scratch, improving technical direction, and helping set the tone for how engineering should work before habits calcify.

2022 → 2025

Head of Engineering · Spacemesh

mainnet, distributed org, operational discipline

Led engineering through launch and steady-state operations of a novel blockchain network, while improving team shape and tightening operational discipline.

2021 → 2022

Senior Engineering Manager & Site Manager · CodiLime

multi-project delivery, people growth, platform work

Managed multiple cloud-native projects, mentored senior engineers, and kept delivery moving across parallel workstreams without losing technical coherence.

2019 → 2021

Head of Engineering · Travelping GmbH

telecom-grade reliability

Ran cloud-based mobile network core systems with strict uptime expectations and real-world operational consequences when things went wrong.

2015 → 2019

Engineering Manager / Tech Lead · Mirantis

kubernetes, enterprise platforms, remote ops

Built large-scale OpenStack and Kubernetes automation, led distributed teams, and helped customers move from fragile installs to repeatable platform operations.

2011 → 2015

Co-Founder / Technical Lead · Codernity

startup builder mode

Co-built products, a company, and the kind of broad technical instincts that only show up when architecture, delivery, and business constraints all arrive at once.

2004 → 2011

Early Career · Various roles and consulting work

python, operations, distributed systems foundation

This is where I built the base layer: backend engineering, consulting, open-source work, and the systems instincts that shaped everything that came after.

contact

If you want to talk through a difficult system, reach out.

I’m always up for a good conversation about architecture, reliability, delivery friction, or the human side of making complex technical work actually work.

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