Problem
A large SaaS engineering org’s monolith team had onboarding times measured in days, not hours.
What I did
Designed and built the team’s remote development environment from scratch.
Outcome
New engineers were productive same-day.
Principal Engineer · Denver, CO
The tangled legacy build, the migration nobody wants to own, the platform decision that needs twenty years of experience behind it — that's where I come in.
My core focus is developer productivity and internal platforms, but I also tackle broader senior engineering work. If a project is ambiguous, highly technical, and requires experienced judgment, let's talk.
Find where engineering time leaks out through slow builds, brittle environments, and manual toil, then fix it.
Move teams off legacy build tooling (Ant, Maven, aging Gradle setups) without stalling delivery mid-migration.
Design and ship the internal tools, devcontainers, and platform surfaces engineers actually want to use, not the ones they’re forced to.
While these are my main focus areas, I'm also open to broader senior engineering work — like architecture reviews, technical due diligence, or complex systems problems that don't fit a clean category. If you have a unique challenge in mind, I'd love to chat.
A large SaaS engineering org’s monolith team had onboarding times measured in days, not hours.
Designed and built the team’s remote development environment from scratch.
New engineers were productive same-day.
Lon Hutt is a Principal engineer with 20 years of experience building developer tools and platforms, most recently at Salesforce, with prior work at MarkLogic. His focus is the layer underneath the code — build systems, dev environments, internal tooling — the infrastructure that determines whether engineers spend their day building or fighting their setup. He also works more broadly as a senior engineering consultant on problems that need judgment and experience over a quick fix.
Based in the Denver, Colorado area, working with engineering teams wherever they are.