Proof

Full-stack Product Engineer for Remote Startup Teams

How I Help Teams Move Faster

I help small teams ship product faster, modernize safely, and reduce engineering bottlenecks.

I have 13 years of experience building software, including work in startups and small teams. For the past 12 years, I’ve worked remotely and asynchronously, including shipping production software for a platform serving 1M+ users. I most recently worked as a Founder / Engineer, building products from product direction through delivery.

Where I Create Leverage

• •Ship full-stack features end-to-end with minimal oversight.
• •Modernize legacy systems without slowing roadmap delivery.
• •Own architecture + implementation in lean, async teams.

Selected Work

Nine Muses - Founder / Engineer

I started both products after a freelance client asked for related work and later abandoned the project. At the time, I found no direct comparable solutions for either scalable xenForo hosting or AI-powered thread summarization. A comparable AI product entered the market before I finished my prototype, but the work still gave me useful experience taking an unfamiliar product idea from concept through implementation.

Scalable xenForo hosting

• •Problem: The standard way to host a xenForo forum is to manually configure a VPS with the required software, settings, and forum-specific setup. That approach works for individual customers but does not provide a practical foundation for hosting many forums consistently at scale.
• •Action: Designed a stateless hosting platform that used Dockerfiles to configure application servers running on a platform-as-a-service provider, object storage for persistent files, and database-as-a-service for persistent data.
• •Outcome: Built a functioning hosting platform with a consistent deployment model. The economics were less favorable than my initial research suggested, however, and the per-user cost prevented me from undercutting xenForo's own hosting product.

AI thread summarizer

• •Problem: Forum users had to work through long discussion threads to find the most useful information, and no comparable summarization product existed when I began exploring the idea.
• •Action: Built a working prototype spanning xenForo integration, application logic, AI workflows, and the user-facing summaries experience.
• •Outcome: Validated the core product direction and the technical workflow for turning long discussions into clearer, more accessible summaries.

NamePros - Full-stack Developer

• •Context: NamePros was a domain-name marketplace and research community, implemented as a xenForo forum, where domain investors researched, bought, and sold domain names. The platform served more than 1M users.
• •Extending the platform: xenForo dynamically loads custom add-ons that can modify or extend nearly any part of the system. I spent most of my time designing and building add-ons for functionality that was not available by default, including additions to the search system and tagging for user-generated content beyond threads.
• •Delivery workflow: The product team typically provided a concise brief. I worked with them to clarify the general direction, developed the implementation plan, built the changes, tested them deeply on a live development server, and pushed the completed work to production. I owned the full delivery lifecycle after the initial idea.
• •Upstream debugging: On approximately 10 occasions, I discovered bugs in xenForo itself. I investigated each issue in depth, identified the underlying cause, documented reliable reproduction steps, and submitted suggested changes with each report to the xenForo development team. Every reported bug was subsequently fixed in the core software, with attribution given to me on the developer forum.
• •Team contribution: Reviewed pull requests from the other two programmers and helped maintain consistency and quality across the codebase.
• •Outcome: Combined deep platform knowledge with independent product delivery, allowing the team to turn concise product ideas into tested production features while also improving the underlying software ecosystem.

Jobs2Careers - Software Engineer

• •Context: Jobs2Careers was a pay-per-click job listing site. A dedicated sales team brought new companies onto the platform, and my responsibility was handling the technical work required to get each client’s jobs into our systems. The platform processed more than 5M listings daily.
• •Problem: A minority of clients could provide daily XML feeds. Those feeds were relatively straightforward because a shared parser could normalize the different fields into our internal job format. Most clients could not provide feeds and instead required us to collect jobs from their public career sites.
• •Action: Built several types of ingestion integrations: standard PHP crawlers for simple HTML sites and Casper-based headless-browser crawlers for JavaScript applications such as Taleo. The browser-based integrations had to interact with each site like a normal user and extract job data from the DOM after the platform rendered it. A database-backed job queue scheduled the daily execution of all integrations.
• •Delivery model: On busy days, I built approximately 5–10 client-specific scrapers or crawlers using a small set of reusable patterns with site-specific changes. The repeated work exposed an opportunity for a more generalized ingestion framework, but the pace of new client onboarding kept the team focused on delivering each integration.
• •Outcome: Maintained reliable daily ingestion across structured feeds, static job portals, and JavaScript-heavy platforms, improving the coverage and freshness of the job listing inventory.

How I Work and What I Use

• •Core stack: TypeScript (full stack), React, Node.js, Docker
• •Also: API integrations, legacy modernization, and remote async execution
• •Working style: autonomous, ownership-driven, startup pace

What I'm Looking For

I'm seeking a full-time product engineering role with a small, distributed team.

Let's Talk

1. Send a short note to hire@jonathanmetz.dev.
2. Share your bottleneck by including the specific engineering problem.
3. Get a concise response with a practical approach and suggested next steps.