NAME · ADAM KICKBUSH ROLE · SR.SWE YRS · 12 TZ · GMT-8 / SEATTLE LCL · 16:14:24

BUILDS THINGS THAT WORK.

12 years of shipping software — interfaces that feel like nothing, APIs that don't wake you at 3am, and infrastructure that quietly compounds. Currently freelance, taking 1–2 contracts per quarter.

// STACK_LIVE
SVELTEKIT96%
LARAVEL92%
PYTHON88%
AWS85%
POSTGRES90%
AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·AVAILABLE FOR CONTRACT · Q3 2026 · SVELTEKIT · LARAVEL · PYTHON · AWS ·

NOW/

UPDATED 2H AGO
NOW_BUILDING
an internal tool for a YC fintech
READING
"Designing Data-Intensive Applications" — again
LEARNING
rust + axum, slowly
LISTENING
tycho · burial · floating points
LAST_DEPLOY
2h ago — atlas v2.4.1
>> BY THE NUMBERS
12+
YEARS_SHIPPING
40M
EVENTS_PER_DAY
140
PUBLIC_REPOS
3,210
PRS_MERGED

WORK/

06 / 24 SHOWN
>> 03 / PROCESS

HOW I
WORK.

Five stages, no deck-ware, no theater. Engagements run 6–14 weeks.

01
LISTEN

A 60-min unstructured call. I want to understand the actual problem before pitching a solution.

02
SCOPE

A short written brief — what we're shipping, what we're explicitly not shipping, where the risks are.

03
PROTOTYPE

Week 1 ends with a clickable prototype or a working spike, not a deck. We pressure-test it together.

04
SHIP

I work in 2-week chunks. You see something real every Friday. Production deploys are uneventful by design.

05
HANDOFF

Documentation, runbooks, a Loom walkthrough, and a 30-day stabilization window. Nothing surprises you on day 31.

SERVICES/

3 SHAPES OF ENGAGEMENT
// 0 → 1

PRODUCT_BUILD

You have a thesis and need it shipped. I take it from sketch to production — frontend, backend, infra, the lot.

Best for: pre-seed → series A teams that need a senior engineer who owns outcomes.

from $24K / month
// embed with team

STAFF_AUG

Drop into your existing team for a quarter. Code reviews, architecture, mentoring, and shipping the gnarly tickets nobody else wants.

Best for: small-to-mid teams hitting a complexity wall.

from $18K / month
// 1–3 weeks

SYSTEMS_AUDIT

Architecture review with a written report — what to fix now, what to fix later, what is fine despite what your CTO believes.

Best for: teams about to do a rewrite. (Spoiler: usually you shouldn't.)

$14K flat
2024 —
INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR
self · Seattle
  • Fintech, dev tools, climate. 1–2 engagements / quarter.
2021–24
STAFF ENGINEER
Lattice (acquired) · remote
  • Owned the data platform — 40M events/day.
  • Led the analytics rebuild; cut p95 by 78%.
  • Mentored 6 engineers, 2 promoted to senior.
2018–21
SENIOR ENGINEER
Mile · series B SaaS · Seattle
  • Shipped the deploy console used by all 60 engineers.
  • Migrated the monolith to ECS without an outage window.
2015–18
FULL-STACK ENGINEER
Northstar Studios · Portland
  • Built 14 client products. Most still in production.
2014
B.S. COMPUTER SCIENCE
University of Washington · Seattle
  • Honors. Capstone: real-time WebSocket fanout at 10K+ connections.
>> 06 / FAQ

OFTEN
ASKED.

Pre-seed through Series C. Anything bigger usually has the org to do this in-house, and frankly I work better with small teams who can move.
Sometimes. I prefer cash + a small advisory grant for early-stage product work I genuinely care about. I won't do equity-only.
Yes — a sensible one. Mutual NDAs only; nothing that locks me out of the industry for 5 years.
Almost never. I do my best work between 9 and 5 GMT-8. If you need a 24/7 contractor, I'm the wrong hire.
I can do credible product design, but I'm not a brand designer. I have a short list of designers I love working with — happy to introduce.
I'm stack-pragmatic. SvelteKit + Laravel + Python + AWS is my default because it's boring, fast, and I've shipped a lot with it. I'll happily work in your stack instead.
" The best software disappears — it does the thing, returns the answer, and gets out of your way. Most of my career has been about closing the gap between intent and outcome by ten or twenty seconds at a time.
— A.K. / NOTE.MD / 2026

SAY
HELLO.

I read everything. Even the cold pitches. Tell me what you're building and what's getting in the way.

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