About

I’m Brian Shimkus, a Chicago-based front-end and product engineer. I build React and TypeScript interfaces for complex workflows, working with stakeholders from discovery through release and adoption.

At Marex, I led a five-person front-end team and helped move broker and trader onboarding from paper to a digital process. Through Insolla, I combine consulting with independent product development, including LeadFlow and Salesforce Intelligence.

How I got here

It all started back in 2006 as a junior in high school when I dove into my fascination with websites and finally taught myself how to build one. While I initially participated in the world of web development for fun as a hobby, I quickly realized the rising demand for web development services and my freelance business was born.

I built myself a portfolio website, had business cards made, and went door to door to all of the businesses in the neighborhood, offering to build them a website or enhance their existing one. Before I knew it, my summer break turned into many late nights working on websites for all of my new clients and I couldn't have been happier.

Fast forward to my college graduation in 2013, I landed my first professional developer role for a startup. This experience was like getting a master's degree as I got to wear a lot of hats and work with all kinds of different languages, tools, and technologies related to the web development world. I also got to work alongside senior level developers and learn about best practices as it pertains to this industry.

In the years since, I've had the pleasure of working across many different industries, building websites for professional sports teams, medical apps to assist doctors with their patients, onboarding tools for traders within the finance space, and much more.

These days I pair that front-end and product background with applied AI. I am building Intake Desk, a human-reviewed intake workflow where every AI-extracted field shows its evidence and nothing is written until a person approves it. I do this through Insolla, my independent consulting and portfolio practice, where I built and deployed Salesforce Intelligence, a live grounded assistant over Salesforce CRM data that shows source records for every answer. It has shown me where I want to keep working: customer-facing products where the interface, the integration, and the AI all have to hold up in regulated, real-world workflows.