Hi, I'm Joe Van Dyk

I'm a senior engineering leader with 20+ years of experience shipping revenue-generating products that people love to use.

As CTO at Crowd Cow since 2015, I've built and scaled our custom Rails marketplace from startup to a thriving business. Before that, I was CTO at Tanga (2007-2015) and did embedded software at Boeing (2004-2007).

My deep domain expertise spans Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, AWS/Kubernetes, recommender systems, and LLMs. On the business side, I have extensive experience in e-commerce operations, shipping logistics, inventory management, and customer support systems. I'm passionate about building teams, sustainable food tech, and creating transparent remote culture.

I'm at my best when I'm growing teams and individuals. Over the past decade I've scaled engineering orgs from a two-person skunkworks to fully distributed squads spanning five time-zones, all while keeping a bias-for-action and a culture of psychological safety. Mentoring, pairing, and championing developer happiness are non-negotiables for me—happy teams ship better products, faster.