Product Engineering
For founders and teams who need a senior engineer who can own a feature or a product end to end, not just implement a ticket.
I build products people actually pay for.
I'm a software engineer building production software at a German software company. Outside of work, I build and run SaaS products of my own, with paying customers across three continents.
Services
How I can help
Two ways to work together, described in business outcomes, not a laundry list of frameworks.
SaaS & Internal Tools
For businesses that need software built from scratch: dashboards, APIs, customer portals, workflow tools, with the same care I put into my own products.
Selected work
Products designed for real use
Two featured projects. Each began with a concrete problem and shipped with a measurable business outcome.
Formgrid
- Problem
- Businesses needed form backends without vendor lock-in, opaque data practices, or building a server for every site, and once submissions came in, no way to track or follow up without a separate CRM.
- Solution
- An open-source form backend and no-code builder with a built-in lead pipeline and an AI Smart Inbox that automatically categorizes, prioritizes, and summarizes every submission.
- Business outcome
- Grew to 400+ users with paying customers across multiple continents through organic SEO. Open-sourced with 46 GitHub stars and processes over 1,000 submissions each month.
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Express
- Prisma
Sheetrocket
- Problem
- Teams needed live spreadsheet data in their products, without backends, Cloud credentials, or fighting API rate limits.
- Solution
- A micro-SaaS that turns any Google Sheet into a documented JSON API, with dashboards, caching, and usage controls.
- Business outcome
- Grew to 200+ active users and validated product market fit with no external funding.
- React
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Node.js
- MySQL
- Prisma
- Redis
How I work
A calm path from idea to launch
Five clear stages. You always know where we are, and what comes next.
- 01
Discovery
Clarify goals, users, constraints, and success metrics, so we build the right thing first.
- 02
Planning
Architecture, scope, and milestones. A clear plan before a single feature ships.
- 03
Development
Iterative delivery with working software every sprint. Transparent progress, no black boxes.
- 04
Launch
Hardening, documentation, and handoff so the product lands cleanly in production.
- 05
Support
Optional partnership after launch: fixes, iteration, and guidance as usage grows.
Experience
Impact over job titles
Roles framed by the problem solved and the business outcome, not a stack dump.
Senior Frontend Engineer
Green Vision Solutions GmbH · Germany · Remote
2024 - Present
- Problem solved
- GreenHub's carbon reporting UI needed higher accuracy and reliability for the audits hundreds of companies rely on.
- Business outcome
- Refactored the frontend architecture with React and Redux Toolkit to separate forms from views, rebuilt the KPI dashboard's data formatting and calculation logic for audit-grade accuracy, and built a Jest test suite to catch regressions before release. Reduced redundant API calls and prevented empty resource creation, improving server reliability, while more accurate KPI dashboards and faster QA cycles contributed to customer adoption and revenue growth over the past 2 years, as the sole frontend engineer on the platform.
- React
- TypeScript
- Redux Toolkit
- Jest
Frontend Engineer
Asqii LLC · Remote
2021 - 2023
- Problem solved
- School Desk needed a clearer admin experience for schools running complex, decentralized operations.
- Business outcome
- Faster delivery with the CTO and backend team, a more intuitive admin UX, and stronger adoption among administrators.
- React
- React Native
- Redux
- JavaScript
Junior Full-Stack Developer
aPavone Concepts · Remote
2020 - 2021
- Problem solved
- An e-commerce platform needed steady feature delivery and fewer production bugs.
- Business outcome
- Improved usability and stability while building the foundation for independent product ownership later.
- PHP
- MySQL
- React
- JavaScript
Writing
Notes from the work
Working notes on backends, retrieval, and the bugs that only show up once real data is in the system.
- nestjs
12 min read • Sep 5, 2026
NestJS for Node Express Developers: A Practical Guide, With Prisma ORM
If you already know Express well, NestJS isn't a new backend paradigm, it's a way of organizing the things you already do. Here's the mental model that made it click, mapped directly to Express, using Prisma.
- nextjs
7 min read • Sep 1, 2026
I Built a Next.js Auth Boilerplate That Saves Developers Two to Four Weeks of Setup Time
Every new project starts with the same authentication build: signup, verification, password reset, OAuth, protected routes. I got tired of building it from scratch, so I built it once, properly, and open sourced it.
- engineering
10 min read • Aug 31, 2026
I Deployed a Backend API on Vercel and Here Is What Broke
My in-memory cache worked perfectly locally and was silently empty on every request in production. Here's why Vercel's serverless model breaks caching, rate limiting, and background jobs, and what actually fixed it
8 min read • Aug 28, 2026
I Added AI Lead Classification to My Form Tool Without Slowing Down Submissions
I added AI-powered lead classification to my form tool. Here's how I designed it to categorize, prioritize, and summarize incoming form submissions without putting AI on the critical path.
I build from Ghana. The products get used everywhere.
Hi, I'm Allen Jones.
I've spent six years shipping production software. I'm currently the sole frontend engineer on a carbon reporting platform used across Germany and Europe. Alongside that, I've spent the past year building Formgrid.dev on my own, at night, from writing the backend to writing the blog posts that got it found. A lawyer in Brazil found it through Perplexity AI. An event manager in San Diego upgraded the same day she signed up. Neither of them cared where it was built. They cared that it worked.
I hold every project to that same standard. It has to work for the person with the problem.
Available for select projects
Have a product to build? Let's talk.
Ready to build your next product? Complete the consultation form below to get started.
For general inquiries, message me at: allen@formgrid.dev
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