RV Rowan Vale
Hire me

One slot open for Q4 2026

Software that outlasts the sprint.

I'm Rowan Vale, an independent engineer. For nine years I've built TypeScript services, design systems and data-heavy interfaces for product teams, from the first commit to the 3 a.m. page.

See the work Book an intro call
rowan.ts 
export const rowan = {
  role: "independent engineer",
  stack: ["TypeScript", "Postgres", "HTMX"],
  shipped: 40,
  pagerAt3am: false,
  available: "Q4 2026",
};▊
Trusted by
NorthwindKestrelArcadiaLoomworkFathomBramble

Selected work

Three systems, still running.

Every engagement ends with me off the pager and the team able to change it without me.

A settlement dashboard with charts open on a laptop
01 2025 Payments

Kestrel Ledger

A settlement dashboard for a payments platform. Millions of daily rows folded into one ledger the finance team actually trusts.

Reconciliation that took two days now finishes in 90 minutes.

TypeScriptPostgresRedisHTMX
A component library shown on a desktop monitor
02 2024 Design systems

Arcadia

Sixty components, one token pipeline and the docs that stopped nine product teams from reinventing the same button.

A screen ships in an afternoon, not a sprint.

ReactTokensStorybooka11y
Rows of network racks lit in a server room
03 2023 Data

Northwind Mesh

Streaming pipelines and a warehouse layer rebuilt around contracts, so a broken upstream stopped meaning a broken Monday.

1.4B events a day, pipeline lag under 90 seconds.

PythonKafkadbtDuckDB

What I'm for

Four things I'm useful for.

  • 01

    Product engineering

    Web apps and APIs carried end to end: schema, queue, deploy, and the pager that follows.

    TypeScript · Node · Postgres

  • 02

    Interfaces & design systems

    Tokens, components and the written guidance that keeps a design coherent after I log off.

    Tailwind · Figma · Storybook

  • 03

    Performance & reliability

    Measure before guessing, then dashboards that prove the fix held six months later.

    Profiling · SLOs · Tracing

  • 04

    Data-heavy products

    Dashboards, pipelines and queries that stay honest, readable and quick at three in the morning.

    SQL · dbt · DuckDB

Client testimonials

In their words, not mine.

5 clients · 4.9 / 5 on repeat work

  • The rare engineer who reads the whole codebase before suggesting a patch. Our on-call pages halved, and nobody has had to touch that service since launch.
    Priya Raman VP Engineering, Kestrel

    Kestrel Ledger

    -52%

    on-call pages in nine months

  • Rowan turned nine teams' worth of opinions into one component library, and then made it boring to use. That is the highest compliment I have for a design system.
    Tomás Lindqvist Head of Design, Arcadia

    Arcadia

    9 → 1

    teams sharing one system

  • Our pipelines broke every other Monday. After the contracts rework we stopped talking about them, which is exactly what you want from data infrastructure.
    Hannah Okafor Data Platform Lead, Northwind

    Northwind Mesh

    <90s

    pipeline lag at 1.4B events a day

  • He scoped the work honestly, shipped the first slice in eleven days and documented every decision. We hired two engineers off the handover notes alone.
    Marcus Bell Founder, Loomwork

    Loomwork MVP

    11 days

    from kickoff to first customers

  • Rowan found a 400 ms query hiding in plain sight and fixed it in an afternoon. Then he wrote the dashboard so we would catch the next one ourselves.
    Sana Whitfield CTO, Fathom

    Fathom Performance

    6x

    faster p95 on core dashboards

01 / 05

How an engagement runs

Read. Ship a slice. Hand over.

  1. 01

    Read

    A week inside your code, your tickets and your incident history before a single proposal.

  2. 02

    Ship a slice

    The thinnest end-to-end piece in production inside two weeks, so risk shows up early.

  3. 03

    Hand over

    Docs, runbooks and a pairing week. I leave the keys, not a mystery.

9 yrs
Shipping software, from first commit to seed to scale.
40+
Systems still running in production somewhere.
4
Startups taken past their two-hundredth employee.

Get in touch

Let's build something that lasts.

Tell me what you're building and what's in the way. I'll reply within a day, usually with a question.

[email protected] Book a 30-minute intro