Senior engineers
shipping real software
since 2007.
Digital Kozak is an Austin consulting firm founded in 2007 by Michael Shapiro. Our primary practice is helping mid-market companies escape expensive SaaS — Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot, WordPress, Tableau — by replacing it with custom software they own. Senior team, no offshore subcontracting, no junior-learning-on-your-dime.
We pick the work we take. The replacement work is the bulk of it; alongside that we still build AI pipelines that need to actually ship and rescue projects someone else broke. If your problem is better solved by a boilerplate agency or an in-house hire, we'll tell you.
Michael Shapiro, founder & CEO.
Michael Shapiro is the founder and CEO of Digital Kozak. He started his career as a server-hardware engineer at Dell Computer, then transitioned into product management — an unusual path that taught him to ship products developers want to use and businesses can actually run on.
In 2007 Michael founded Digital Kozak as a software development and consulting firm to bring that engineering-first product mindset to a broader set of clients. Over the 19 years since, he has served as virtual CTO for multiple companies — guiding architecture, hiring, and the messy decisions in between — and grown DK into a senior team of developers, designers, and product owners.
Today his focus sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI tooling and shipped software: getting LLMs, agents, and ML pipelines into production where they earn back their cost, not stop at demo day. The current focus of the firm — getting clients off expensive SaaS and onto custom software they own — is the natural product of an engineer-PM who believes companies should run on systems they control, not subscriptions they rent.
- B.S. Computer Engineering, MSU
- Personal career: 26 years (Dell server engineer → product manager → DK founder, 2007)
How we operate.
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Seniors on the keyboard
The people who scope your project are the people who build it. No bait-and-switch to juniors post-signature.
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Ship or kill
Every sprint produces something running in production or it produces a decision to stop. No dashboards that nobody opens.
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Boring tech where it fits
Postgres, React, Python, Node. We reach for exotic stacks only when the problem genuinely requires them.
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Full transparency
Slack-shared boards, weekly demo, raw burn-down. You see what we see, including the bad days.
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Say no early
We turn down projects we can't do well. It saves everyone time and money — and earns our honest yes.
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6-hour response
Every message, every weekday. Not a chatbot. An actual engineer on your account.
Small team. Deep bench.
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Principal · Engineering
Production systems at Series-B through enterprise scale. AWS, Python, Postgres, Node. Ex-early-stage CTO.
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Principal · Design
Product design for SaaS, fintech, and healthcare. Figma to production with no handoff gaps.
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Senior · ML
Gradient boosting, transformers, MLOps pipelines. Published research, production scars earned.
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Senior · Mobile
Native iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), Flutter and React Native. 18 App Store launches.
Years in public.
- 2000Michael Shapiro joins Dell's server division as a hardware engineer; later transitions into product management.
- 2007Michael founds Digital Kozak as a software development and consulting firm.
- 2012Team grows past five engineers. Multi-disciplinary delivery model formalized.
- 2016First AI engagement — a computer vision pipeline for aerial imagery.
- 2018Moved to a senior-only model after burning out on junior churn.
- 2020Crossed 100 shipped projects. Introduced the 6-hour response SLA.
- 2023LLM practice launches. Production GenAI shipping monthly thereafter.
- 2025SaaS-escape practice formalised: fixed-fee audit + fixed-bid replacement build for NetSuite, Salesforce, WordPress, BI.
- 2026200+ projects shipped. Still a small senior team. Still Austin.