Helping growing companies make the right architectural calls and scale their engineering function with confidence.
Currently taking on new engagements
You might recognise your situation in one of these.
Your engineering team has grown past the point where one person can hold the whole architecture in their head, and decisions are starting to feel improvised rather than deliberate.
You don't have a senior technical voice in the room for board or leadership conversations — someone who can translate between what the business needs and what the system can actually do.
You're facing a build-vs-buy-vs-rebuild decision and want an experienced outside opinion before committing.
You know roughly what you need to build, but need help defining exactly how it should work — and then someone who can help build it.
You need more senior engineering capacity alongside your existing team, without a slow full-time hiring process.
If any of that sounds familiar — that's the kind of work I do.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time, and look for ones with real depth — a multi-week project, or an ongoing role, rather than one-off ad-hoc tasks.
FIXED SCOPE · DEFINED DELIVERABLE
ONGOING · EMBEDDED · DISCUSS ON A CALL
DAY-RATE OR PROJECT · RATE ON MALT
CASE 01
Leading through hypergrowth and a pivot.
I joined Foundation Health as the first hire outside the founding team — early enough to help shape the technical foundation from day one, architecting and building the initial platform from scratch, including infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
When the company pivoted, I led my team through the transition, driving development of its next product from the ground up. Along the way, I defined the engineering processes — code quality standards, testing and QA practices, and production ownership — that let my team scale without breaking down, and had a genuine hand in shaping similar practices as engineering grew more widely across the department.
Over that period, Foundation Health scaled from 5 people to over 65, with the engineering team growing to 35+, and secured a Series A of $20m+.
CASE 02
Architecting a critical, shared platform.
At cinch, a national motoring marketplace, I was appointed Tech Lead for a new platform intended to become a critical, shared service used department-wide — the kind of foundational system multiple other teams would come to depend on.
I led a team of four engineers and designed a fully serverless AWS architecture — API Gateway, Step Functions, Lambda, EventBridge, and SQS — built for that shared, cross-team use case. I worked closely with the Product Owner and both technical and non-technical stakeholders to translate requirements into architectural decisions the wider department could build on.
Backend-leaning full-stack engineer and technical lead with 13 years' experience across healthcare, motoring, retail, gaming, government, and travel.
That includes being the first engineering hire outside the founding team at a healthtech startup that scaled from 5 people to a $20m+ Series A. I lean on Domain-Driven Design to bridge technical and business goals, and I'm comfortable picking up whatever language or stack the problem actually calls for.
Remote-native and based in France. I work with teams across the UK, the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia — there's almost always enough overlap in the working day to collaborate closely, wherever you are.
We talk through what you need, and what "done" looks like. If that's not fully clear yet, that's fine — defining it together is part of the value.
I put together a proposed way forward: scope, service type, and what I'd deliver.
Once we're aligned, we agree concrete deliverables and get moving.
I work best against a clear goal — even one we define together as we go — and I aim for every engagement to end with something tangible in your hands: a report, a working system, a handover to your team.
Backend-leaning full-stack. I pick up whatever language or stack the problem actually calls for.
“David was an invaluable asset to our team. His candour and feedback helped ensure continuous improvement in both the software we built as well as our ways of working. David has an impenetrable need to do the right thing, resulting in all his solutions being well-thought-out and robust. He successfully led our team through the design and development of cross-functional, cross-team, full-stack projects, with a keen ability to transform stakeholder needs into scalable, secure, and reliable software.
“David is a true team player, often going out of his way to mentor and coach less experienced members of his team. He'd often check on me, unprompted, to see how my day was going. I've thoroughly enjoyed working with David, and would love the opportunity to do so again.”
“I've worked with David both when he was a software engineer on my team and reporting to him as my tech lead. I always enjoyed pair programming with him — he was clearly very knowledgeable, fun to work with and had an excellent work ethic.
“He's a fantastic team player, which he always demonstrated by fostering an excellent learning culture within our squad and by being keen to stay close to the engineering even when he was busy with planning and other tech-lead duties. I hope we can work together again at some point.”
The best place to start is a short intro call — we'll work out whether it's an architecture review, a fractional role, or hands-on build work, and what "done" looks like for you.