Systems that hold up
when the traffic — and the team — grows.
Independent consulting for engineering teams at the inflection point: the product is working, the load is climbing, and the architecture that got you here won't get you to the next 10×. I help you scale it deliberately, not frantically.
How I help
Senior, hands-on, vendor-neutral. Engagements are scoped to a decision or an outcome — not billable hours.
Architecture Review
A clear-eyed read of your current system: bottlenecks, single points of failure, and the two or three changes that actually move the needle.
Scaling & Performance
Find where latency and cost hide — data access patterns, caching, queues, hot paths — and a sequenced plan to fix them without a rewrite.
Cloud & Cost
Right-size infrastructure, cut waste, and design for scale-to-zero economics. Spend that tracks usage, not fear.
Data Platform
From overloaded primaries to read replicas, partitioning, and event pipelines — data layers that grow with the product.
Pragmatic Modernization
Break the monolith only where it pays. Strangler-fig migrations that ship value every step, never a big-bang gamble.
Fractional Architect
Ongoing senior guidance for your team — design reviews, hard calls, and mentoring — without a full-time hire.
How engagements run
Short, focused, and biased toward decisions your team can act on the same week.
Listen
Understand the product, the load, the roadmap, and the real constraints — technical and organizational.
Diagnose
Map the system, measure what matters, and separate the noise from the two or three things that decide scale.
Sequence
A plan with order and trade-offs: what to do now, what to defer, what to never do. Written to be handed to engineers.
Support
Stay in the loop through implementation — reviews, course-corrections, and unblocking the hard calls.
Why work with me
Two decades of shipping and scaling real systems — the judgment that only comes from having been on-call for your own decisions.
Let's talk about your scaling problem
Tell me where the system hurts. If I'm not the right fit, I'll tell you that too.