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. Joe Krukosky is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cool Fire Inc., a technology company he and his wife, Liz, founded in 2005. His career spans four decades in technology. Throughout it all, one thing has remained constant: he loves figuring out how things work—and finding better ways to make them work. Joe's early career began in the United States Air Force, as an electronic technician. After leaving active duty, an unexpected path through MBNA's aviation department led him into information technology, systems administration, networking, database development, and software automation. Along the way, Joe developed a philosophy he still uses today: understand the problem first, then figure out which technology—if any—is the right way to solve it. In 2005, Joe and Liz put that philosophy to work for themselves, founding what is now Cool Fire Inc. Liz serves as CEO, while Joe, as CTO, focuses on technology, development, architecture, and the particularly stubborn technical problems that inevitably find their way to his desk. Cool Fire began as a general technology consulting company, but after discovering Drupal in 2007, its focus increasingly shifted toward custom websites and web applications. Today, Joe and the Cool Fire team build solutions ranging from business workflows and administrative tools to e-commerce systems, mobile integrations, reporting platforms, APIs, and large web applications. Joe's favorite projects are rarely the simple ones. He is drawn to unusual requirements, complicated business processes, and ideas that begin with someone saying, "We're not sure this can be done." Those are usually the fun ones. Although Joe has spent much of his career writing code, he doesn't believe technology should require a translator to be useful. His approach starts with people: What are they trying to accomplish? What's frustrating them? Where is time being wasted? What would make their day easier? That perspective allows him to move comfortably between the big picture and the details. Also that what works perfectly on paper doesn't quite work in the real world. While Joe's responsibilities are more managerial today, he remains a hands-on developer and enthusiastic experimenter. As technology changes, he continues asking the same questions: What's it do? What's it solve? And is it genuinely useful? Away from Cool Fire, Joe enjoys restoring and repurposing old things through his side business HelmDog, traveling by RV with Liz, and boating—particularly sailing. Joe and Liz have been happily married for more than 30 years and have four grown children, two dogs, and four cats. Fittingly, March 4, 2005—the day Joe and Liz founded Cool Fire—is also the day their first granddaughter was born, making Cool Fire's anniversary as much a family milestone as a business one.
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.
