About RJ Lindelof, CEO of RJL Software, Inc.

I am a technology executive who has spent the last twenty years turning engineering organizations into a business advantage. I set technology strategy, drive platform scalability, and lead AI adoption at private-equity and venture-backed companies and mid-market enterprises, always in close partnership with product.

That work has meant scaling multi-tenant SaaS platforms, taking agentic AI systems from experiment into production, and modernizing cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure. The goal is the same every time: engineering execution tied directly to business strategy, so delivery speeds up, infrastructure cost comes down, and customers and investors both see measurable value. Automation, performance, and reliability are not side projects in the organizations I run; they are built into how the work gets done.

I hire, develop, and retain high-performing technical teams, and I have been doing it at a distance longer than most. I have led hybrid teams since 2006 and fully remote, global engineering teams since 2012, well before distributed work was the default. Onshore, nearshore, and offshore engineers operate as one engineering organization with shared standards and shared ownership, never as a vendor on the far end of a ticket queue.

I spent thirteen years as an individual contributor before moving into leadership, and I have stayed close to the code ever since. That player-coach credibility is what lets me push senior engineers and architects on where a technology helps and where it quietly introduces risk, and it is why the teams I build learn faster, ship cleaner, and waste less time mistaking status meetings for architecture.

My brand is not my title. It is the outcome plus how I operate. I have a low tolerance for theater, and I do not run engineering organizations on the appearance of work.

Mostly in regulated B2B SaaS: HealthTech at hc1 and GlobalMed, EdTech at Follett and Ruffalo Noel Levitz, FinTech at DebtPayPro, GovTech today, and PE-backed home-services software at Successware. The ownership models have covered the full range: private equity, venture capital, founder-owned, and bootstrapped.

The common thread is a platform that has to grow while it is being rebuilt, with auditors, customers, and investors all watching. At Successware I grew engineering from 30 to 175+, with 80% of that growth in a single nine-month window, while holding a 99.95% SLA for 10k+ concurrent users.

Dates, scope, and results for every role are on the career timeline and track record.

• Leading engineering, AI, and automation as a member of the executive leadership team.
• Rewriting a legacy platform to feature parity on a modern stack, on one-week sprints, without freezing customer value.
• Keeping AI spend honest. The most recent result: a 90% cut in LLM inference cost, found by profiling the workload before optimizing it.
• Running RJL Software, Inc., as I have since 1994.
• Writing about AI-native engineering leadership, AI governance, and platform modernization, mostly on LinkedIn.
• Listening. See the roles I consider.

• Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Columbia College Chicago.
• Associate in Applied Science, Computer Information Systems.
• DataCamp certifications: AI Governance; Understanding AI.
• Anthropic certifications: Claude Agent Skills, Claude Subagents, Advanced Model Context Protocol, Claude Integrations.

I do not have a graduate degree. I have not found a role in 20+ years where this mattered. My credibility comes from outcomes, not credentials.