Five ways to work together, from a focused two-week review to owning engineering as a fractional CTO. Every engagement starts with understanding the failure cases, not the happy path.
2 to 3 weeks. Fixed price.
For: teams hitting limits at peak load, facing a big launch, or inheriting a system nobody fully understands.
You get: a written report with risks and bottlenecks ranked by impact, a target architecture, and a prioritized plan your team can execute without me.
How: code and infrastructure walkthroughs, interviews with engineers and product, load and failure-mode analysis, then a readout with your leadership.
4 to 8 weeks. Project based.
For: new real-time or gaming products, and platforms that must grow several times over without a rewrite.
You get: service boundaries, messaging and consistency model, capacity plan, API contracts and a delivery roadmap in stages your team can ship.
How: I work alongside your leads, run design reviews and leave behind standards that keep the architecture coherent as the team grows.
3 to 6 weeks. Project based.
For: fintech, iGaming and marketplace products where a duplicated or lost transaction costs real money and trust.
You get: ledger and wallet design, idempotency and retry patterns, provider integration blueprint, reconciliation and audit approach.
How: we model every ambiguous state (timed out, pending, duplicated) explicitly, then test those paths before the happy one.
Retainer. 2 to 3 days a week.
For: companies that need a senior technical owner now, before they can hire one full time or while the current leader focuses elsewhere.
You get: technical strategy, team structure and hiring, delivery process, vendor coordination and an architecture that matches the business plan.
How: I have led departments of forty and coordinated a hundred-plus across teams. I bring that operating model with me and hand it over when you are ready.
4 to 8 weeks. Project based.
For: teams where releases take months, incidents repeat, and nobody is sure what is running in production.
You get: CI/CD and zero-downtime deployment practices, observability with SLOs that mean something, and an incident process people actually follow.
How: the same playbook that took one department from two-month releases to two weeks and raised throughput by 87%.
Discovery
One to two weeks. I read the code, talk to the people and map where the system really hurts.
Architecture and roadmap
Target design, tradeoffs made explicit, and a sequence of changes that keeps the business running.
Delivery and hand-over
Hands-on with your leads until the new shape holds on its own. Then I step back.