# Hire

By Simon Hørup Eskildsen · 2023-05-17 · https://sirupsen.com/hire

<Favicon emoji="👨‍💻" />

I worked for 8 years as a Principal Engineer of Infrastructure at Shopify,
chasing bottlenecks in every layer of the stack from 100s of RPS to ~1M. I've
seen every stage of scale: from startup, to powering a significant chunk of the
world's commerce.

Today, I consult with companies to scale and evolve their web infrastructure.

I can deliver the most value if your problem fits one of the following:

1. **Audit.** You bring me your pressing infrastructure woes, I start grepping
   your code-base and write a detailed report with actionable solutions that
   your engineers can run with. _1-3 weeks_
2. **Prototype.** You bring me a gnarly backend/infrastructure/database problem,
	 I iterate from [first principles](/napkin/process) to implement you a
	 prototype your team can run with. Either alone, or with part of your team.
	 _6-12 weeks_
3. **Launch.** You're launching and worried your infrastructure will crack under
   the pressure. I do an audit and get on the ground to firm up the infra for
   launch, and give you a post-launch infra roadmap. _2-4 weeks_
4. **Review.** You're about to make a big infrastructure decision. I go through
      it with you and the team in detail and help go from sketch to plan. _1-5 days_
5. **Workshop.** You want to level up your infrastructure team in system design.
	 I do a workshop in-person or online on first-principles systems thinking and
	 napkin math. _2 days_

**Make your infrastructure decisions with someone who's done it before.**

Next step is to email [`simon@webscale.ca`](mailto:simon@webscale.ca) and tell
me which problems you're dealing with, and we'll set up an intro call.

I am comfortable at all layers of the stack, from Kernel to Rails to React.
You can read more about what I spend time thinking about on the [Napkin Math
blog](/code).

**Examples**

* 2023
  - **Review for [Ghost](https://ghost.org/)**: 3-day in-person offsite to turn an infrastructure idea into a concrete plan.
  - **Infrastructure Project:** Will reveal later what this is... spending majority of 2023 on this.
  - **Prototype for [Replicate](https://replicate.ai/):** faster cold boots for large ML models
  - **Audit for [Typefully](https://typefully.com/):** focus on [Timescale scalability](https://www.timescale.com/), best-practises, and observability.
* 2022
   - **Review for [Whimsical](https://whimsical.com/)**
   - **Launch for [Readwise](https://readwise.io/read):** [Reader launch](https://readwise.io/read), especially database and job tuning
   - **Prototype for Readwise:** [Ghostreader](https://twitter.com/deadly_onion/status/1592990487257829376), AI-reading assistant
   - **Prototype for [Datafold](https://datafold.com/):** [data-diff](https://github.com/datafold/data-diff/), fast diff between two databases
   - **Review for [Rutter](https://rutter.com/):** Database migration woes
   - **Prototype for [Causal](https://causal.app/):** [Scaling their spreadsheet engine from millions to billions of cells](https://www.causal.app/blog/scaling)

> Simon was an indespensible addition to our team as we geared up to launch a
> new product (Readwise Reader). He assessed our site’s bottlenecks across all
> areas (code, servers, db, team), made them incredibly clear to us, then simply
> fixed the biggest issues with minimal supervision. Without Simon, I’m
> confident we wouldn’t have been able to to hit our launch deadline.
> Potentially the best part of working with Simon is that while being an 100x
> engineer with incredible impact, he also has amazing communication skills,
> often predicting my objections and conveying to me (and our eng team) all
> critical information/tradeoffs we might need without wasting our time. Simon
> is the closest thing to a silver bullet I know of in tech!
>
> -- Tristan Homsi, CEO & Co-Founder Readwise

> Simon gave us a clear and actionable technical roadmap for the next 1-2 years
> that will allow us to scale our business 10-100x. His expertise and guidance
> gave us the peace of mind that we were making the right decisions and not just
> guessing on big infrastructure questions. It was like having a veteran CTO on
> our team, available whenever we needed him. We can't recommend him enough.
>
> -- Francesco Di Lorenzo, Typefully Co-founder
>
> We all are over the moon with how it all went and are incredibly excited for
> the project. What felt like an impossible hill to climb now feels like
> something we can actually complete and within a reasonable timeframe to boot. 
>
> -- James Loh, Infrastructure Lead at Ghost

[data-diff]: https://github.com/datafold/data-diff/