Tomasz Kowalski
CTO at Sembot · Founder, Iseno

Tomasz Kowalski

AI-native software development·Software architecture·Go

10+ yrs in architecture, SRE and team leadership

I moved a SaaS company to AI-native software development — in production, not as a pilot. At Sembot (e-commerce SaaS) agents write most of the code, CI gates guard quality, and people decide what we build and when we ship. A year ago 12 people worked in our development and QA. Today it's 3 developers and 1 QA, and we ship more than ever.

Track record

A year of AI-native
delivery in numbers
1,600+
merged PRs in 30 days, ~95% of commits written by agents
12 → 4
people in development & QA — 3 developers and 1 QA
30 min
median from PR open to merge (18–21 h a year ago)
5 mo
to ship the new Sembot: ~20 Go services replacing the monolith
Tests grew with it: Laravel 97 → 1,092 test files, Go 27 → 1,124, E2E scenarios 64 → 409. The new Sembot went through 860+ production releases and the legacy system was switched off on 7.10.2026.

How I can help

Talks, workshops
and advisory
01 — Talks
Conference talks
What changes when agents write the code: who is still needed, what breaks, and the numbers behind it. Straight from a production setup, including what went wrong.
02 — Workshops
Workshops for engineering teams
Hands-on sessions on Claude Code and Codex in real delivery: CI quality gates for agent-written code, worktrees, review without the bottleneck.
03 — Advisory
Rebuilding the delivery process
For companies moving from “AI assists developers” to “AI writes, humans decide” — process, roles, guardrails and architecture (Go, DDD).
Talks
liderzy.it — „Budowa oprogramowania w erze AI” — 11.2026
„Kod na żądanie, development w zarządzie. Kto jeszcze jest potrzebny?”
Ecommerce.pl Event 6.0, Warsaw — 10.2026
Workshop „Q4 bez niespodzianek. Zbuduj system kontroli konta”
AgenticCoding.pl — 11.2025
„Developer w epoce AgenticAI – między wizją a walidacją”
Courses & certificates
DataWorkshop: Software 3.0 – Agentic AI Systems (levels 4 & 5)
2026
DataWorkshop: Practical LLM
2026
AI_devs 3: hands-on Generative AI course
2024
AI_devs 2: integrating GPT-4 with applications and automation
2023
DataWorkshop: NLP Challenge (editions 4 and 5)
2019
Professional Scrum · Attacking and defending web applications (Niebezpiecznik)
2016 – 2018

How we build

Agents write.
People decide.
Orchestrated agents
Hermes, an orchestrator agent I built on Codex, triages tasks every few hours, runs Claude Code sessions in isolated worktrees, spins up a 24-hour test environment and hands a draft PR with screenshots to QA.
Quality gates, not manual review
A test for every change (a change without a test fails CI), technical debt that can only go down, quarantine for flaky E2E tests, machine-by-machine rollouts that stop on the first error, monitoring with escalation.
QA and business ship
Most of the code is now shipped by QA, the C-level and Customer Success working with agents. Developers guard patterns, performance and security.
Architecture that fits AI
A Go gateway and ~20 Go services that replaced a Laravel/Angular monolith feature by feature (strangler pattern), in 5 months.
Stack & specialisms
Claude Code Codex Agentic AI Go DDD / CQRS CI/CD GCP SRE Playwright

Experience

Architecture, SRE
and leading teams
CTO · Sembot
06.2025 – present
SaaS platform for e-commerce and agencies: campaign, product feed and ad account automation (Google Ads, Merchant Center, Bing Ads). Stack: Go, Laravel, Angular.
AI-native development (2025 – present)
  • Rebuilt the delivery model: from 12 people (dev + QA) to 3 developers and 1 QA, with higher throughput. Tickets from QA and Customer Success are implemented by agents, and the C-level ships product changes with agents.
  • Orchestrated agents: Hermes, an orchestrator agent I built on Codex, triages tasks every few hours, runs Claude Code sessions in isolated worktrees, spins up a 24-hour test environment and hands a draft PR with screenshots to QA.
  • Quality gates, not manual review: A test for every change (a change without a test fails CI), technical debt that can only go down, quarantine for flaky E2E tests, machine-by-machine rollouts that stop on the first error, monitoring with escalation. Result: 1,600+ PRs in 30 days, median time to merge 30 min (previously 18–21 h).
  • Tests in one year: Laravel 97 → 1,092 files, Go 27 → 1,124, E2E scenarios 64 → 409.
  • Earlier (2025): CodeGen Manager (Go): Jira task → AI agents in Docker containers → draft PR on GitHub, with a library of 45 agents in a pipeline planning → analysis → implementation → verification → auto-fix.
New Sembot – service architecture (05.2026 – 10.2026)
  • Designed and led the build of the new Sembot: a Go gateway (templ, HTMX, Alpine.js) with a single access-control layer and ~20 Go services with their own data (CRM, notifications, telephony, invoicing, public API, OAuth connection vault, AI Marketer).
  • Gradual takeover of the Laravel/Angular monolith, switched feature by feature; legacy system switched off on 7.10.2026, about 5 months from start. 860+ production releases.
  • Q4 traffic readiness: from 22 backend calls on page load down to one, 34 h from first commit to production.
  • Built Sembot Sales Manager from scratch: a multi-tenant sales CRM (leads, sequences, mailing, Twilio telephony, reports), 430+ releases.
Architecture, DevOps and team
  • Domain architecture standard (DDD/CQRS) for the Laravel backend, with architecture tests; Google Merchant Center integrations.
  • CI/CD with container deployments (GitHub Actions, Docker, Traefik): 8 development environments, branch environments, QA, beta and production, release and rollback process.
  • Onboarded Customer Success and support to work with Claude Code (skills, documentation for agents): they ship fixes reported by customers themselves.
Stack: Go, PHP 8 / Laravel, Angular, HTMX, Claude Code, Codex, MCP, Docker, Traefik, GitHub Actions, n8n, Playwright, Cucumber, Sentry, OpenTelemetry
Senior Site Reliability Engineer · Miinto
02.2022 – 06.2025
International fashion marketplace connecting boutiques with customers across Europe. Microservices on GCP.
  • Replaced manual deployments with a fully automated process: from a GitHub Actions artifact to a multi-zone GCP rollout with database migrations, monitoring and integration tests (TeamCity, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Terraform).
  • Designed a new product catalogue system and AMQP inter-service communication libraries; fully in production after 6 months.
  • Supported the QA team technically: critical paths, pre- and post-release environment tests, protocol compliance tests; improved incident procedures.
Stack: Go, AMQP/RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Redis, GCP, BigQuery, Ansible, Terraform, TeamCity, GitHub Actions, Sentry, Grafana
Founder & Owner · Iseno
03.2016 – present
  • Software house: custom CRM systems and applications supporting clients' business processes. Technical sales, estimation, solution architecture, team leadership and maintenance of deployments.
Co-founder & Senior Software Architect · e-ux.pro
10.2018 – 04.2022
  • Responsible for technology: application architecture, standards, the delivery process and the development team. The agency was recognised by The Manifest (2021).
Senior Architect Developer · ENetProduction (client: Media Expert)
01.2020 – 09.2020
  • Sales system of one of the largest electronics retail chains in Poland: cart, product availability, checkout, API integrations with banks (purchase financing).
Architect Developer · IncredBots
05.2019 – 12.2019
  • Architect at the software house delivering the Evenea event platform (Symfony, React).
Architect Developer · Evenea
05.2019 – 12.2019
  • Architecture and rollout of the new version of the Evenea event management and attendee registration platform (Symfony, React).
Earlier positions (2014 – 2019)
Senior Backend Developer · IT Safety
10.2018 – 04.2019
  • Development of a web platform in PHP 7 / Symfony and MySQL. Reference from the CEO.
Senior Backend Developer · PMQ
04.2018 – 09.2018
  • Design and development of LTTS software for a private healthcare facility (2 projects) and its rollout at the client (PHP, Symfony, PostgreSQL), server administration. Reference from the board.
Senior Software Developer · GoldenSubmarine
03.2015 – 03.2018
  • Design and development of web portals for agency clients (PHP, JavaScript, MySQL), server administration. Leading complex projects from analysis to rollout. Reference from a board member.
Software Developer · Jaskółka Catering
09.2014 – 12.2015
  • Custom backend of a catering company's online shop, new features and technology advice.

Skills

What I work
with every day
AI in development
Claude Code (subagents, worktrees, skills), Codex, agent orchestration, MCP (Figma, Playwright), CI gates for AI-written code, LLM-as-judge, FinOps for LLMs
Architecture
DDD, CQRS, microservices, strangler pattern, event-driven (AMQP/RabbitMQ), API design
Backend / Frontend
Go, PHP (Laravel, Symfony), Python · Angular, React, templ, HTMX, Alpine.js
Cloud / DevOps
GCP, BigQuery, Docker, Traefik, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, TeamCity, n8n
Quality
Playwright, Cucumber (BDD), PHPUnit, E2E and contract tests · Sentry, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
Management
rebuilding a team's way of working around AI, onboarding non-technical teams to work with agents
Education
Polish Naval Academy, Gdynia
2012 – 2016 · Engineer, Internet technologies
Languages
Polish
native
Spanish
fluent (C1)
English
good (B2)
Outside work: swimming coach (Total Immersion), diving (PADI OWD), IoT

Contact

Let's talk about
your delivery process
Talks, workshops and advisory on AI-native software development.
[email protected] →