Engineering-led from day one.
Cool Fire Inc was founded in 2005 by Liz and Joe Krukosky with a simple conviction: that organizations deserve a technical partner who executes with discipline, communicates honestly, and stays accountable long after launch.
Twenty years later, that conviction hasn't changed.
No commitment. Just a conversation.
A technical partner, not a vendor.
Cool Fire is a Drupal and digital platform engineering firm. We specialize in building, modernizing, and supporting web platforms for higher education institutions, nonprofits, and enterprise organizations, the kinds of platforms where reliability isn't optional. We've been fully remote since 2005, long before it became standard practice. Our team of experienced engineers work across PHP, Drupal, React, Laravel, DevOps, infrastructure, integrations, and AI, and if you need something else, chances are we can do that too. We're not the agency that hands your project to a junior team after the kickoff call. Every engagement is handled by senior engineers who've seen this before: the upgrade that looked simple until it wasn't, the integration that needed three rewrites, the platform nobody wanted to touch until we cleaned it up. We take the work seriously. We also genuinely enjoy it. That combination is rarer than it should be.
Led by the people who built it.
Liz Krukosky
Liz has led Cool Fire since its founding in 2005, overseeing client relationships, business strategy, and the long-term direction of the company. She brings decades of experience working with organizations that depend on their digital platforms to deliver on their mission, and a firm belief that good engineering partnerships are built on trust and straight talk, not sales decks.
Joe Krukosky
Joe has been the technical backbone of Cool Fire since day one. As CTO, he leads engineering decisions, sets the standards for how work gets done, and stays close to the code. His depth in Drupal architecture, platform engineering, and emerging technologies like applied AI keeps Cool Fire at the front of what's possible and practical for the organizations we serve.
What it's like to work with us.
Remote since 2005
We've been a fully distributed team since the beginning. Our processes, communication, and delivery standards were built for remote work, not retrofitted for it.
Engineering-led
We lead with engineering discipline. When something is complex, we say so. When something is risky, we flag it early. You'll always know where things stand, not just at status meetings, but in the moments that matter.
Your goals, not just your tickets
We take time to understand what your platform actually needs to do for your organization. If we see a problem coming, we tell you before it lands on your desk.
Long-term minded
Our strongest client relationships have lasted years. We think about your platform the way an internal team would, not as a project to close, but as infrastructure to protect.
Committed to the Drupal community.
Cool Fire has been part of the Drupal ecosystem since Drupal 5. We are a Drupal Association member and have built our practice on Drupal's strengths, its enterprise scalability, security model, content architecture, and active global community. We stay current. We follow core development closely, test against new versions early, and build with long-term maintainability in mind. When Drupal moves, we move with it.
Why Cool Fire?
In the early days, Liz and Joe would bring their laptops outside and code by the fire. At some point one of them said, "This is a cool fire", and somehow that stuck. It's a simple origin for a company that's grown into something we're genuinely proud of. But it also captures something true about how we work: we'd rather be building something together than sitting in a conference room talking about it.
