Services
Everything I do is basically the same job at different scales. Look at what’s actually there, figure out what’s broken, fix the important things in order, stop.
Sometimes that’s a production system. Sometimes it’s a codebase someone’s about to invest in. Sometimes it’s a person.
Career coaching
I help people change jobs. From “I think I want to leave” through to signed offer. Positioning, search, interviews, negotiation.
The negotiation piece is where people consistently leave money on the table, because nobody ever teaches you how to do it. I’ve coached people into roles they didn’t think they could get, at compensation they didn’t think they could ask for. It keeps happening.
Mentoring
I mentor engineering leaders, CTOs, and individual contributors.
For leaders, it’s usually about the decisions that don’t have a clean answer: when to rewrite vs. when to fix, how to structure a team around a system that’s outgrowing its architecture, how to make the case for work that doesn’t ship features.
For developers, DevOps, SREs, it’s more hands-on. You tell me what you’re stuck on, I tell you what I’d do and why. I’ve been across enough different environments that I’ve seen most ways things go wrong. That’s the whole pitch.
Systems
Fifteen years inside production at Sched, deviantART, Hitlist, Noom, and a bunch of companies you haven’t heard of. It’s always some version of: things are more fragile than anyone admits, nobody has time to fix the foundations, and there’s one engineer everyone’s afraid of losing because they’re the only person who knows how half the stack works.
I come in for 60 to 90 days with a fixed scope. Find the problems that are actually costing money, fix them, write everything down, hand it off. I don’t do transformation programs.
Due diligence
VCs and PE firms hire me to figure out what they’re actually buying. I go through the codebase, the infrastructure, and the team, and I tell you how far the pitch deck is from what’s running in production.
If you want, I stick around after the deal closes and do the fixing. That usually works better than handing my report to someone who wasn’t in the room when I found the problems.
Best way to reach me is through LinkedIn.