About Rafal
My offer focuses on solving problems that require the combination of technical depth with a business and product view, where big-picture thinking and attention to detail complement each other.
That combination comes from a business-oriented mindset built in startup and product environments and engineering depth built through enterprise systems work. On these fundamentals I can take on different kinds of work, including:
- Hands-on engineering work with designing the whole solution starting from a high-level problem. I've built many complete products myself.
- Advisory on software engineering and surrounding areas like infrastructure, processes, documentation - aligned with business context.
- Legacy code modernization or system migration, where understanding the whole context and requirements discovery are as important as technical details.
- Technical assessments like due diligence, production readiness review, and root cause analysis.
Pricing
- 80-120 EUR/h. The lower end reflects hands-on engineering work. The upper end reflects strategic and advisory work.
- Technical assessments are charged separately as a short time-boxed work: 4,000-7,000 EUR for an assessment, based on roughly a week of dedicated full-time work. Final price depends on scope and complexity.
Polish
Native or bilingual
English
Fluent
Remote only
Primarily works remotely
Experience
- Rafal KochanowskiAI Engineer - Independent software productsApril 2025 - Today (1 year and 3 months)Linz, AustriaEach one built end-to-end, in response to a gap I saw in existing tools.Slopo (slopo.dev) - an open-source CLI tool (200+ GitHub stars) that finds a specific kind of code duplication AI agents introduce and then can't detect themselves: the same logic reimplemented in a different form, too far apart in the codebase for an agent to hold in context. Uses embeddings to surface it and works alongside the agent to review and refactor.Rechtina (rechtina.at) - a legal AI assistant, free and open to the public, where commercial tools are expensive and aimed at lawyers. Built with RAG and reranking, deployed as a real production system, and kept cheap to run by relying on smaller, cost-efficient models.Hiker (hiker.at) - an AI tool that helps hikers make sense of detailed forecast data for the Alps and the rest of Europe. An LLM chat with tool calling, kept low-cost through prompt caching and a compact forecast format.
- NeturalSoftware Engineer - Backend Systems & ArchitectureJuly 2023 - September 2024 (1 year and 2 months)Linz, AustriaOwned the full migration of a legacy web application to a modern stack: architecture, authentication, cloud infrastructure, and database. Planning and requirements discovery mattered more than the code here, and the result was over 10x performance improvement at lower maintenance cost. Separately, designed a SOAP integration before the requirements were known, keeping the architecture minimal so early delivery was possible without locking in future technical debt.
- BinarAppsSoftware Engineer - Backend DevelopmentJanuary 2022 - May 2023 (1 year and 4 months)Lodz, PolandBrought in where requirements were undefined and the schedule underestimated. Worked with the client to find the actual need, then designed the minimal solution rather than the impressive one, and made the trade-offs the deadlines forced. Also worked on an enterprise banking system built on microservices.
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Certifications
- Andrew Ng's Machine Learning courseStanford University on Coursera2021