About Salamander Systems

The salamander was said to pass through fire unharmed — a fitting mark for a practice built to keep systems running when everything is under pressure.

Salamander Systems Consulting is the independent practice of John Wichorek, a senior database and application engineer with 25+ years across healthcare, market research, financial services, and manufacturing. Deepest in Oracle, and increasingly across PostgreSQL and cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure).

Founded in 1998, Salamander delivers senior expertise directly to clients — without the overhead and markup of a staffing firm. I design, build, optimize, and migrate database-backed systems, and resolve the production problems that internal teams and outside vendors couldn’t crack.

How I work

• The person who scopes the work is the person who does it. You get the senior engineer, start to finish — no hand-off to a junior.
• Solve with what you already own. Where it’s possible, I fix it with the tools and licenses you already have, not ones you’d have to buy.
• Built to actually run. The goal isn’t a deliverable that demos — it’s a system that holds up at peak load and after I’m gone.
• Senior engineering, directly. Independent, remote (EST), Corp-to-Corp — no staffing-firm layer between you and the work.

Recent work: a serial migration pipeline re-architected into parallel streaming (12 hrs → 3 hrs); a new PostgreSQL/Aurora data warehouse on AWS with incremental ETL for hourly dashboards; an Oracle batch process taken from 8 hours per client to under 10 seconds.