Working with me
Three engagement modes. Pick the one that's an honest fit, or ask which is.
Most of the time I'm one of three things: a full-time engineering lead, a founding engineer at a small team I believe in, or an advisor on a specific question. The shapes are different. The bar is the same. Read the one that maps to you and skip the rest.
Mode 1 · primary
Engineering lead, full time
What I'd do at a Series-B-and-beyond company with a serious engineering culture and a team between five and fifteen. Player-coach, not pure manager. Fluent in production code on a Tuesday morning and the calibration spreadsheet on a Wednesday afternoon.
Fit when
- There's a real team to lead: five to fifteen engineers, with at least one squad already shipping
- The org is mature enough to support a tech lead but not so mature that the calls are pre-made above me
- Munich, Berlin, or remote-first EU with overlap on CET
- AI-augmented engineering is welcomed, not banned
Not a fit when
- Pure people-management. I write production code most days and want to keep doing it
- Deep IC-only roles below staff scope
- Agencies, consultancies, or staff-augmentation arrangements
- Crypto, gambling, or surveillance-adjacent products
First 30 days
Read the codebase. 1:1 with every report. Sit in on a few oncall handoffs. Identify the single biggest delivery friction the team won't say out loud. Ship a small visible improvement to it before week four ends. Nothing dramatic. The credibility comes from showing up and writing code that holds.
Mode 2 · selective
Founding engineer, seed / Series A
For technical founders who want a senior partner on the keyboard, not a CTO replacement. I do best where the product is real, the team is small, and the next thirty hires are still in front of you. The fourteen years of experience is the cost of admission, not the pitch.
Fit when
- Technical founders who write code themselves and want a peer, not a deputy
- Pre- or just-past product-market fit, with one or two real customers worth listening to
- Comfortable with the tech-lead-shaped half of the role: first hires, first standards, first oncall
- EU-based or comfortable with CET as the centre of gravity
Not a fit when
- Looking for a fractional CTO. My bandwidth is full-time-shaped or it isn't real
- Series B+ where the role is really a director with a startup-y title
- Heavily regulated industries needing dedicated compliance focus from day one
- Founder/CEO who wants someone to defer to instead of disagree with
First 30 days
Ship one user-visible thing in week one, even if small. Set the dev loop, CI, and the first deploy story properly. Write the first three engineering principles for the team you're about to grow. Sketch the next two hires honestly: what they need to be senior at, what you can train. Disagree with the founder once, in writing, before week four.
Mode 3 · ongoing
Consulting
Specific question, fixed scope, weekly readouts. Best when there's a real decision in the next quarter and you want a senior outside read. Worst when used as a substitute for hiring.
Fit when
- An architecture or migration call you want a second opinion on
- Standing up an AI-augmented engineering practice (Claude Code agents, eval sets, safety guardrails)
- Code-review or systems-design coaching for a senior engineer growing toward staff
- A 4–12 week engagement, ~1 day a week, with a defined deliverable
Not a fit when
- Ongoing fractional-CTO arrangements without a discrete scope
- Anything requiring being on a customer's payroll system
- Generic pair programming or unbounded code review
- Engagements where the answer is already decided and you want a stamp
Engagement shape
Typically one day a week for four to twelve weeks. A short kickoff doc with the question, the constraints, and what success looks like. Weekly written readouts. Optional async on Slack between calls. Fixed fee, paid monthly. I'll tell you in week one if I think the engagement won't earn its keep.
Numbers behind the work
Where I've spent the last fourteen years, in metrics that survive the highlight reel.
14+
Years shipping web platforms and customer-facing experiences across four domains.
20+
Engineers directly managed across Tech Lead and Frontend Lead roles.
6 → Sr
Engineers coached to senior-track promotions in the last eighteen months. A seventh paired toward staff.
Read the case study
0
Cutover events on a public GraphQL replatforming. Every production query shadow-diffed against the legacy service before traffic shifted.
Read the case study
p50 ↓ 30%+
Latency reduction on a public API serving 50+ downstream integrations, zero consumers broken.
Read the case study
~30
Claude Code agents in production across multiple codebases: build, scan, review, migration, RBAC validation.
Read the case study