I do consulting work on the side, primarily with small to mid-sized engineering and product
teams. Most of what I help with sits at the intersection of backend architecture, reliability,
and the kind of operational complexity that tends to sneak up on teams as they grow.
Focus Areas
Backend Systems & Architecture
API design, service decomposition, data pipeline architecture, distributed systems patterns — the structural decisions that are cheap to get right early and expensive to undo later.
Reliability & Observability
Incident response processes, on-call culture, alerting strategy, SLOs, distributed tracing, and making sure your team can understand what your system is actually doing at 2am.
Cloud Operations
GCP and AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes, Terraform, cost optimization, and making the jump from "works in staging" to "boring in production."
Security
Threat modeling for backend services, secrets management, least-privilege access patterns, and reducing exposure without grinding engineering velocity to a halt.
Scaling & Growth Readiness
Load testing, capacity planning, and helping teams get ahead of the growing pains before a big launch or inflection point catches them off guard.
How Engagements Work
01
Initial evaluation. Every engagement starts with a flat-rate assessment. I dig into the problem, ask a lot of questions, and put together a written summary of what I'm seeing and what I'd recommend. You own that report regardless of what happens next.
02
You decide what's next. Take the report and run with it internally, bring in someone else, or we continue working together. No pressure either way — the goal of the initial phase is to give you something useful, not to set up a longer contract.
03
Ongoing engagement (optional). If it makes sense to keep going, we can structure something longer — advisory retainer, embedded work, or regular check-ins. Scope and cadence are defined upfront.
I'm also available for one-off second opinions — if you've gotten a recommendation elsewhere and want a sanity check before committing, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to bring to me.