20+ years as a senior engineer & project architect.
Air Force Captain. Physicist. CTO. DeFi banking, AI, tech.
Very limited project capacity.
Two minutes on how the free week actually works.
To start the free week, on the 15-min call we lock three things.
Three real examples. Not demos — code in your repo, Friday evening.
Your support team handles 200 tickets a week. By Friday I’ve shipped an agent (Claude / OpenAI / your stack) that triages incoming tickets, drafts replies, and routes the hard ones. Real classifier, real PR, real tests. Your team reviews and merges Monday.
Your background-job pipeline has been silently dropping events for six months. By Friday it doesn’t. Idempotency, retries, observability — all in one branch with commit messages your future engineer will thank you for.
Stripe webhooks → your Postgres → your dashboard, with HMAC verification, replay protection, and a Grafana view. Shipped Friday. You stop talking about it on every Monday standup.
No logo wall — most engagements are under NDA. Below: a few I can name.
You’ve got working code and you want me to keep going → we talk retainer.
You’ve got working code but want to take it from here → keep it. No invoice.
I didn’t ship what we agreed on → you still keep the code. I cover one referral call to a peer who fits better.
No contract until Friday. No slides ever.
No. Fractional CTOs advise and never open PRs. I write the code, review yours, and ship in your repo on Friday. The senior-architect framing only works if the senior architect is the one writing the code.
Because the deliverable is locked before I start, and you keep the code regardless of what happens Friday. The week filters for clients I want to work with. If I’m wrong about the fit, I eat the cost, you keep the code, and I refer you to a peer.
Then we use the 15-min call to find one. I’ve done this enough that the bottleneck is usually obvious within ten minutes. If it isn’t, that’s a signal we shouldn’t start the week yet.
It’s me. If a project needs a team, I tell you on the call and I will enlist trusted peers to assist.
Python, TypeScript, Postgres, AWS/GCP. Comfortable in Go and Rust where the problem rewards it. AI: Claude, OpenAI, vector DBs, tool-use frameworks. Crypto: EVM, USDC rails, custody patterns.
$200K + benefits + 90-day search + ramp. If you can justify that, you should hire. If you can’t, retainer is the only way to get senior thinking on the cap table without owning it.
An agency sells you a project manager and three juniors. I sell you me, writing in your repo, Friday morning. No PM layer. No status meetings. No SOW negotiation.
I like the name. I think it looks cool.
Happy to sign one if you need it.
No. Equity dilutes the senior-architect framing into co-founder territory and changes the conversation. Cash retainers only.
One-month notice on the retainer side, prorated. No long contracts. The retainer holds because the work’s good, not because the paperwork traps you.
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