About RJ Lindelof
The builder behind NextGen.ing. (Click the photo - it changes.)
The builder behind NextGen.ing. (Click the photo - it changes.)
RJ has been writing software for two decades - long enough to have shipped in Java, JavaScript, Node, .NET, and C++, and long enough to be skeptical of anything pitched as a silver bullet. Thirteen of those years were spent as an individual contributor before he moved into leading engineering organizations, which is why he still talks about tooling like someone who uses it. NextGen.ing is where he works out, in public, what agentic development actually looks like when you take it seriously.
The short version of his view: agents are extraordinary at producing code and genuinely bad at owning judgment. So he runs a multi-model setup - sending each task to whichever model does it best - and keeps the human firmly on intent, architecture, and review. The highest-leverage thing an experienced engineer does in 2026 is not type faster; it is know where AI helps and where it quietly makes things worse.
He still spins up local environments and prototypes alongside the work, mostly to hunt down the repetitive tasks worth automating - a quick script here, a custom MCP server there. He cares as much about quality as about velocity, on the theory that a release which ships on time but does not work is just a cleanup project wearing a deadline. Tests, AI-assisted review, and real feedback loops are how he keeps both.
NextGen.ing is one of a family of sites where he writes about and builds for the AI-native era. None of this is a pitch - it is a working notebook, kept in the open.
Away from the notebook, RJ leads engineering organizations. He has run engineering at PE- and venture-backed companies and at mid-market enterprises, working shoulder to shoulder with product, where the job was scaling multi-tenant SaaS platforms, moving agentic AI systems from demo to production, and modernizing cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure. The thread through all of it is the same one that runs through this site: automation, performance, and reliability built into high-growth environments rather than bolted on afterward.
He measures engineering by what it does for the business - faster delivery, lower infrastructure cost, and value that customers and investors can both see - and he treats lining up execution with strategy as the actual job, not a slide in the deck. The other half of the job is people: hiring, developing, and keeping high-performing technical teams.
Those teams have rarely sat in one building. RJ has led hybrid teams since 2006 and fully remote, global teams since 2012 - long before distributed work was the default - with engineers onshore, nearshore, and offshore across the United States, Central America, Ukraine and the wider Eastern Europe region, Germany, India, China, and the Philippines. He runs them as one engineering organization, not as a vendor on the far end of a ticket queue.
RJ is not actively searching, and this site is not a resume. But he has never closed the door on a good conversation. If you are building something where technology strategy, platform scale, and putting AI to real work all matter - a VP of Engineering role, or one shaped like it - and the company and the fit are right, he would like to hear about it.
Right company, right fit? Let's talk.
Start the ConversationEngineering and the craft of building software in the agentic era.
Notes on AI-native software development and where the field is heading.
Free, privacy-first developer utilities that run entirely in your browser.
The short bio and a map to everything else RJ is building.
Code and open-source experiments at github.com/rjlsoftware.
Professional background and the longer story at linkedin.com/in/rjlindelof.