What each engagement actually involves.

Four services and one method. Every one of them opens with an analysis rather than a proposal, and none of them starts by replacing the team you already have.

Fractional CTO

Senior technical leadership inside your company, for a few days a month instead of a full-time salary.

When you need this

  • Architecture, hiring and vendor decisions are being made without anyone senior enough to own them.
  • Your team ships, but nobody is setting the direction they ship toward.
  • An investor, a board or a client has started asking who your CTO is.

What happens

  • I embed with your team — standups, planning, reviews — rather than reporting on it from outside.
  • I take the decisions that need seniority: architecture, build-or-buy, vendor selection, the hiring bar.
  • I write the reasoning down as I go, so the decisions outlast the engagement.
Pixel-art scene: one office floor where a tidy older half of low partitions, each person at their own desk, opens into a bright studio where four colleagues stand together around a glowing table

What you walk away with

A technical direction your team can execute without me, and a written record of why each call was made.

System Architecture

An objective read on how your system is built, where it will break, and what to fix first.

When you need this

  • Delivery keeps slipping and the cause is structural rather than effort.
  • You are about to commit to a platform, a vendor or a rewrite and want it checked before you do.
  • The system holds today and nobody can say what happens at five times the load.

What happens

  • I read the codebase and the infrastructure, and talk to the people who maintain them.
  • I map the coupling points, the failure modes, and the one constraint actually holding delivery back.
  • I evaluate the options vendor-neutrally. I sell no platform and take no referral fees.
Pixel-art scene: an orderly older utility plant of concrete blocks and neat parallel pipework giving way to a bright modular campus of clean blocks, green roofs and deliberate glowing spans

What you walk away with

An architecture assessment, a risk register ordered by what each risk costs you, and a sequenced roadmap tied to business outcomes.

Legacy Modernization & Engineering Consulting

The system that runs the business, brought up to date in place — and the engineering practice that stops the next one ageing the same way.

When you need this

  • The codebase that runs the business is the one your team is most afraid to change.
  • A rewrite has been proposed and you suspect it costs a year to deliver what you already have.
  • Deployments are rare and frightening, and people have stopped suggesting improvements.

What happens

  • Modernization runs piece by piece, in production, with the business never switched off.
  • The people who understand the old system stay on it. Nobody is replaced.
  • The practice changes alongside the code: how the team designs, reviews, tests and ships.
Pixel-art scene: a calm, well-kept mainframe hall in cool shade opening out into a bright modern data campus of glass, solar roofs and young trees

What you walk away with

A system your team is no longer afraid to change, and the working habits that keep it that way.

Applied AI

Automation that starts from the work your people repeat, not from the model.

When you need this

  • There is pressure to do something with AI and no clear read on where it would pay off.
  • Your people spend hours a week on work that runs the same way every time.
  • A previous attempt produced a demo that nobody uses.

What happens

  • I start from your week: which tasks repeat, what each costs in hours, and which can be handed over reliably.
  • I take the one with the clearest payoff and build it — an LLM, an agent, or plain automation, whichever actually fits.
  • It ships behind the same review and monitoring as the rest of your system.
Pixel-art scene: one room where a tidy back-office of neatly filed paper gives way to a calm automated line, with a single person watching the work run itself

What you walk away with

One repetitive process running without a person in the loop, and an honest read on which of the others are worth doing next.