For founders and SMEs who want their tech spend to actually move the business. I help you build the right things, hire well, control cost, and pass investor scrutiny: senior judgement on a monthly retainer that fits your stage.
Ex-AWS · Ex-Reach plc · Ex-Ticketmaster · 100+ interview panels · 5,000+ engineers in community founded
Set the technical direction. Pick the right stack, design for scale from the start, and avoid the rebuilds that kill 18 months of momentum.
Define roles, screen candidates, sit on interview panels, and shape engineering culture. I've sat on 100+ interview panels at AWS.
Investor-ready technical audits, security reviews, and documentation. Pass diligence on Series A and beyond with confidence.
Database optimisation, caching, cost control, and infrastructure decisions that hold up as you grow from 100 to 100,000 users.
All engagements run as monthly retainers. Exact scope and pricing depend on your stage, team, and needs. These are starting points.
Strategic input for founders making technical decisions
Ongoing senior engineering presence inside your team
Deeper involvement: interim CTO or technical lead
Also available: one-off technical audits and investor-ready due diligence reports, typically £4,000–£10,000 depending on scope.
The projects I've led, architected, or shipped, across AWS, Reach plc, ChargedUp and freelance.
InternalAWS account teams had a beloved but fragile planning prototype. I turned it into a product they use daily, cutting the most common workflow from 9 clicks to 3 and lifting weekly active teams by around 40%.
PlatformA global bank had a working prototype stuck for months and a team about to spend six weeks fine-tuning a model they didn't need. In three on-site days I got the workload live, killed the unnecessary work, and left two of their engineers able to run and extend it themselves.
AI/MLRyanair's staff training was slow and expensive to update. Every change meant re-recording video with human instructors. I helped build a platform that took course updates from weeks to hours, with AI video lessons, a cited Q&A assistant, and voice practice that replaced paired role-play.
AI/MLJournalists at Thomson Reuters could search video archives by headline and date, but never by meaning, so decades of footage sat unused. I led the build that made it searchable by intent in under a second, published as an official AWS solution and showcased at IBC 2024.
Free, no obligation. Tell me where your business is, what you're wrestling with, and I'll tell you whether and how I can help.