When embedding makes sense

You already have a development team. Hiring another senior is slow, expensive, and risky. Boxed agency work does not fit — you do not need a separate project, you need someone in your codebase with your team.

That is where I come in. I plug into your existing process, take ownership of real work, and bring senior engineering perspective from 15 years of shipping production software — including 9 years at GitLab leading complex backend initiatives across teams.

• Your roadmap has a senior-shaped gap
• You need to ship a hard initiative without growing headcount
• Your team is solid but needs an extra hand on architecture or backend
• You want senior code review and mentoring alongside delivery

What I actually do inside your team

Same things your other senior engineers do — just on contract. I pick up tickets, design features, push code through review, debug production issues, and pair with your developers. I am not a strategist watching from the sidelines; I write code.

Where I add the most value is on initiatives that need ownership end to end — a hard migration, a new service, a difficult feature with unclear edges. Things that would stall if you handed them to whoever has spare time this sprint.

• Feature delivery from spec to production
• Architecture and design for new systems or refactors
• Hard-problem ownership (migrations, performance, integrations)
• Code review and architectural input across the team

How an engagement runs

I start with a short scoping call. What is the initiative, who are the people, what is the stack, what does success look like. From there I propose a shape — typically 3 to 6 months, part- or full-time, your tools and your standup.

Onboarding is fast. I have joined enough new codebases to know how to get productive quickly: read code, ship a small thing in week one, own real work by week two. I match your conventions, not the other way around.

• Short scoping call to agree on initiative and shape
• Standard contractor setup — your tools, your process
• Productive in the first week, owning real work in the first month
• Clean handover when the engagement wraps

Stacks I work in

Primarily Ruby/Rails, Node, GraphQL, Postgres, and modern frontend (Vue, React). I have shipped production code in Go, Java, and Python. If your stack is close to one of those, I can be productive quickly. If it is far from any of them, tell me what it is and I will be honest about whether it makes sense.

• Backend: Ruby/Rails, Node, GraphQL, REST, Postgres
• Frontend: Vue, React, modern TypeScript
• Integrations: APIs, webhooks, message queues, third-party platforms
• Cloud, CI/CD, and deployment workflows

What you get from the engagement

Initiatives that were stuck start moving. Code quality goes up where I work. Your developers get an extra senior to bounce design decisions off. And when the engagement ends, you are not left with code only I can maintain — it was written for your team from day one.

• Senior capacity without committing to a permanent hire
• Initiative ownership, not just hours billed
• Cleaner code and stronger reviews across the team
• Clean exit — your team owns what I built