Most founders don't need another engineer — they need someone who can scope the system, make the vendor and security tradeoffs, direct the build, and stay until it's actually live. That's the job.
Turning a product idea into an actual technical plan — which platforms to use, what to build versus buy, and why.
Owning the decisions that actually matter — where secrets live, what's exposed to customers, and what the numbers need to be for the business to work.
Working alongside an engineering partner through the real build — the integrations, the deployment, the debugging — not just handing off a spec and waiting.
Testing the whole system end-to-end before it's real, then staying through the actual go-live — not gone the moment the code is written.
Directed the technical launch of Bashment's e-commerce merch store — a real integration connecting Stripe for payments, Printful for print-on-demand fulfillment, Vercel for hosting, and Supabase for the database.
Owned the requirements, pricing, and security decisions across all four platforms; resolved production issues including a broken deployment pipeline, API permission scoping, and a breaking third-party API change; then validated the full payment-to-fulfillment flow with live testing before taking it live for real customers.
Fifteen years across healthcare, government, hospitality, and the not-for-profit sector taught me where the real gains hide: in the fragmented, manual steps nobody wants to touch — not the headline process everyone's already optimized.
The approach stays consistent with everything else I build: start with a transparent, explainable baseline before reaching for machine learning, and only add complexity once the data has earned it. A team that can't see how the system works can't trust it — and won't maintain it once I'm gone.
Whether it's a technical launch or a manual workflow that needs to become a system — let's talk about what you're trying to build.