Robert FlachWeb Tool Developer

Engineering leadership, architecture, and delivery.

Robert Flach

Director of Software Engineering · Construction Product Line · Skimmer Inc.

Software engineering leader with twenty years building and running global organizations. Currently Director of Software Engineering for the Construction Product Line at Skimmer Inc., hired to run engineering for the construction software line of business. Ran all of software engineering at Point of Rental through 2025: every product line behind $63.5M in ARR, 42 to 55 engineers across four countries. Earlier, VP of Software Development at HRsmart, where a 40-person organization across six countries carried $8.5M in ARR plus $1M a year in custom work. Equally at home setting direction with a CTO, across the table from an enterprise buyer's architects, or pairing on a failing test.

Selected Impact

  • $63.5M ARREvery product line in the company sat under the engineering organization I owned through 2025.
  • 55 engineersLargest organization led, across the UK, US, Mexico and India. Earlier, a 40+ person org across six countries at HRsmart.
  • Near-zeroRegrettable attrition: none among direct reports, one across the organization in four years.
  • $9.1M booked2025 bookings on the cloud platform and e-commerce lines I owneded.
  • Zero backlogCleared 100+ defects in six months. Established a turnaround of 1 to 2 days without pushing roadmap work.
  • 3x velocitySustained across sprints and replicated team by team through AI-assisted development.
  • $1.3M ARREnterprise wins closed as technical lead: Lowe's, Bunnings, Vail Resorts.
  • 9 monthsConcept to production MVP of a full rental ERP, with four engineers.

Experience

Skimmer Inc.–Present
Director of Software Engineering, Construction Product LineOctober 2026 – Present
  • Hired to run engineering for the construction software line of business.
Point of Rental Software Fort Worth, TX · –
Senior Director of Software Engineering 2022 – October 2026
  • Owned all cloud-native systems: the Rental Management System and the e-commerce suite (storefront, consumer equipment portal, unified consumer login), which together booked $9.1M in 2025. Teams in the United States, Slovakia and India. Reported to the CTO and sat on a three-person engineering leadership team with him and the Head of Operations. Managed through managers, with full hiring and performance authority.
  • Owned all of software engineering through 2025: every product line behind $63.5M in ARR, on-premise and cloud, with 42 to 55 people across engineering centers in Reading, UK and Dallas/Fort Worth plus partner teams in Mexico and India. Development, SDET, QA and data, with three directors and a manager reporting in.
  • Tripled delivered velocity with AI-assisted development and held it across multiple sprints, going from about one major feature per review cycle to several. Ran the same play on a second team while the first kept its pace.
  • Drove adoption by building the tooling and proving it on real work rather than mandating it: automated peer review, AI-written test generation, and an orchestrator for many parallel coding agents.
  • Cleared a backlog of more than 100 defects in six months and changed how new ones are handled. Changed the process so incoming defects closed in 1 to 2 days without pushing roadmap delivery. Got there with wider automated coverage, AI triage, and a failing test written before every deterministic fix.
  • Shipped customer-facing AI: an assistant that answers customers' questions against their own reporting data, and a storefront image pipeline that generates imagery and batch alt-text with human review.
  • Technical lead in enterprise sales for Bunnings (AU, about $500K ARR) and Vail Resorts (about $200K ARR and growing). Handled the architecture, integration and security questions with both business and engineering buyers.
  • Set direction for a Node.js and NestJS micro-application architecture, modernizing the platform a piece at a time instead of by rewrite.
  • Held regrettable attrition near zero: none among direct reports, one across the wider organization in four years, with several senior engineers past five years' tenure. Former direct reports now hold director-level roles at Point of Rental and elsewhere in the industry; internship alumni lead the company's premium AI product and anchor its payments quality team.
Director of Software Engineering 2018 – 2022
  • Directed the payments replatform from LAMP to Node.js and NestJS. Built the replacement as a micro-application using the legacy system as the template, embedded it a piece at a time, then retired the old integration outright. Owned it from vision through implementation, and the same pattern has since been reused elsewhere on the platform.
  • Built the e-signature service now used by every Point of Rental product, including the legacy Rental Management System lines.
  • Closed Lowe's (~$600K ARR) as technical lead alongside the CTO.
  • Founded the company's annual hackathon and ran its first three years. It is now in its sixth and still puts features into the product.
  • Moved from leading by influence to direct people management across the cloud engineering teams, taking on hiring, performance and career development.
Director, Software Architecture 2013 – 2018
  • Hired to build a new product line from scratch. Delivered a full cloud-native rental ERP from concept to MVP in under nine months with four core engineers: quote-to-return transactions, serialized inventory, a pricing and rate-scale engine, payments, maintenance scheduling, self-service signup with automated billing, multi-company administration, a storefront, and 60+ reports.
  • Built it multi-region and highly available on AWS (EC2 autoscaling, Aurora, PHP/Symfony, Angular and Node.js over a REST API) at 99.99% uptime.
  • Landed the first live customer, the National Basketball Association, in year one; then Sodimac, South America's largest home-improvement retailer. The line reached month-over-month profitability in year five. Co-founded the internship program whose alumni now include the architect of the company's premium AI product.
HRsmart Richardson, TX · –
Vice President of Software Development 2010 – 2013
  • Consolidated developers working in project silos into a single 40+ person global organization across the United States, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Lebanon and the Philippines, aligned to the bottom line rather than to individual projects.
  • Supported clients in 18+ countries representing $8.5M in ARR, plus $1M+ annually in custom development.
  • Cut revenue lost to unbilled custom work by 24% by instrumenting and accounting for it accurately for the first time.
  • Moved the organization onto modern version control and concurrent-development practices; grew with the company from roughly 40 to over 300 people globally.
Director, Professional Edition Development 2009 – 2010
  • Launched a new self-service SaaS product line into a newly created P&L center, reaching $500K+ ARR within two years.
  • Owned design, architecture, delivery, automated deployment and the billing portal; led a 12+ person team across the United States, Argentina and Lebanon.
Manager, On Demand Technologies 2007 – 2009
  • Built a self-service vertical SaaS applicant-tracking product from scratch; grew the team from three to five.
Senior Application Developer 2005 – 2007

Technical Profile

Leadership Organizational design across distributed global teams · hiring, performance and succession · developer-productivity and AI adoption programs · technical lead in enterprise sales · engineers developed into directors and architects
Architecture Micro-application and incremental replatforming · multi-region high availability · multi-tenant SaaS · payments and e-commerce integration · LLM-backed product features
Technology PHP / Symfony · Node.js / NestJS · JavaScript & TypeScript · Angular · React · MySQL and PostgreSQL · AWS (EC2 autoscaling, Aurora, Lambda in Node and Python) · C# and .NET Core / .NET Framework · Python · Azure

Earlier Career, Education & Service

2000–2002 Keane / Metro Information Services. Senior Consultant to Freddie Mac; cut order-processing turnaround by over 200%. Before that, I-Tech Consulting, consultant to Sprint.
1995–1999 United States Navy. IT2, Lead Developer and Systems Administrator. Led eight administrators running a 24/7 data center and built the ship-wide intranet. Navy & Marine Corps Commendation Medal and two Achievement Medals.
Education B.A., English, summa cum laude. University of Texas at Arlington, 2004. Later taught English there for one year as a graduate student.