I work with founders, CIOs, CTOs & boards focused on architecture, system design, and technical due diligence. I bring architectural discipline to AI-assisted development.
A founder needs senior technical leadership to design and deliver an MVP.
A production system starts to break under growth. Performance, security, scalability or infrastructure costs are becoming a problem.
Systems built by different organizations or with different technologies need to be integrated and work together.
A company needs to establish or evolve its technical organization, from architecture and engineering practices to pre-sales and professional services.
A board, founder or investor needs an independent assessment of technical readiness before making a significant investment or strategic decision.
A company has its software built by a supplier and needs someone on its side who can judge estimates, answers and releases.
After ACI group acquired its traffic agency, I assessed the inherited PHP and Oracle system: it could not scale and went down repeatedly. I designed its replacement: 18 services on AWS that merge six sources on DATEX II, GTFS and TMC every 3 to 5 minutes and serve about 10,000 events a day to HERE, TomTom, Radio24 and others.
54% of database waits came from writing a log row for every API request: 2 billion rows, 13 TB. Caching token validation cut total SQL time by 77% and database CPU by 89% in load tests. I led the architecture review and the caching strategy with Redis on top of the database.
12 servers processed 6,000 files an hour, but searches took minutes and history was limited to two months. Our MongoDB proposal won a competitive PoC against SQL Server and Oracle. In the design benchmark, the new write path sustained 537 writes per second against the 300 required for ten times the volume.
A behavioural assessment method, which scores candidates against role profiles, lived in a spreadsheet with its algorithms and 7,500 past responses. I rewrote the scoring engine in Java on RESTHeart and MongoDB, with tests that compare profiles and population statistics against the spreadsheet. The multi-tenant web application reached production in under three months.
A single shared architecture for a luxury brand: frontend in Berlin, backend in Gurgaon, deployment in Shanghai, client in Geneva. Local compliance and localization were built into the design. It kept teams aligned across time zones.
I co-created RESTHeart, the open source backend for MongoDB, in 2014: more than ten years in production, adopted by Unisys, Northrop Grumman, Crownpeak and others. RESTHeart Cloud, MobiStream and Sophia, a RAG platform, are built on it.
Architecture sets the boundaries between components and the patterns that connect them, such as microservices or event-driven integration. Once the system is in production, it is the hardest part of the design to change.
System design maps the logical architecture onto a cloud or on-premises system, where it meets the constraints of physical reality. It decides how the system handles traffic peaks and server failures.
Software design is the structure of the code inside each component. I write it test-first and refactor it continuously, and every change goes through continuous integration. Code written by AI agents goes through the same tests before it is merged.
I approach agentic development through the discipline of Lean engineering: clear value streams, bounded roles, and continuous refactoring.
Agents need explicit job descriptions and hard guardrails. The workflow operates as a pull system: well-specified tasks wait on a board, where dedicated agents pull work within their scope, implement changes, and validate them against tests.
Without that structure, agents simply generate more code than anyone can review.
Thirty minutes to describe the situation and work out whether I am the right person for it.
If you need an NDA before the call, send it with the invitation.