FinTech & Payments
Fractional CTO of a payments/fintech startup, building the engineering org behind 6 products. Earlier: integrated PayPal, Authorize.Net, Nelnet, and CashNet gateways into production billing platforms.
- 40%Engineering throughput increase
- 20%Reported bug reduction
- $72K+Annual compounded savings
- 2M/minPeak requests sustained
- 50K+Merchants served
- 2 → 26Team built across 6 products
- 300+Developers on authored playbook
- 15+ yrsTechnical leadership
01 Who I am
About
I'm a technology leader and architect who builds engineering organizations from the ground up — the operating model, the people, and the platforms. Across 15+ years I've operated as Fractional CTO, Head of Engineering, and Principal Architect: scaling teams, modernizing architecture, and tying every technical decision to a business outcome — higher throughput, lower cost, faster delivery.
I work end-to-end — from presales and strategy through architecture, delivery, and the on-call pager — across FinTech & Payments, HealthTech, EdTech, HR, and high-scale Ecommerce.
02 Where I operate
Domain Expertise
HealthTech
Architected Medicaid/Medicare billing, patient-admission, and electronic medical-record systems handling sensitive clinical and financial data end-to-end.
Ecommerce
Senior Architect / Tech Lead on a review platform serving 50K+ merchants — sustained 2M requests/minute through Black Friday / Cyber Monday with a 3-person team.
EdTech
Built enrolment, student-records, and course-management platforms, with payment and social integrations for online learning.
HR / HCM
Delivered a full 7-module HR application solo in 2–4 weeks — an estimated 5-engineer effort.
03 Track record
Experience
Fractional CTO
- Built the engineering organization from zero — operating model, hiring bar, delivery processes, and engineering best practices adopted across all teams.
- Scaled the team from 2 engineers on the first project to 26 engineers, QAs, and PMs delivering 6 production products; owned hiring, performance management, and offboarding.
- Drove the commercial engine end-to-end — presales, proposals, and prototyping through execution and delivery.
- Set technical direction and solution architecture for a regulated payments domain.
Head of Engineering & Technical Consultant
- Lifted weekly completed stories 40% and cut reported bugs 20% within one year by re-architecting delivery processes and quality policies.
- Absorbed a 45% headcount reduction with zero loss of throughput and zero backfills, through upskilling and process redesign.
- Cut cloud spend from ~$5–6K to ~$2K/month and drove ~$72K+/yr in compounded savings via infrastructure optimization and automation.
- Led early AI adoption — SDR AI Voice Training Agent, AI Search, N8N lead-generation, and CRM/sales-pipeline automation — recovering ~$30K/yr in hours.
- Authored an engineering playbook adopted by 200+ engineers and corporate staff; improved developer retention ~10%.
- Stood up a Data Lake foundation with custom pipelines and reporting; recruited a Head of Data and a Head of Cloud & Infrastructure.
- Built and unblocked 6+ revenue-generating client delivery engagements from presales through delivery.
Consulting & Architecture
- Technical Program Manager — Airline (via consultancy), 2022–2023: defined program goals, roadmap, and technical strategy; grew the team 6 → 12 in six months; owned cross-team communication and risk management.
- DevOps / SRE Lead — Pharma & Enterprise, 2021–2022: drove Agile/DevOps adoption in waterfall enterprises; authored cloud/DevOps playbooks; built CI/CD and incident-automation workflows (XMatters, ServiceNow, Azure Monitor) that cut manual operations effort.
- Senior Software Architect — Multiple clients, 2021: designed gateway/microservice architectures; led AI-based automation with Azure Cognitive Services; modernized legacy Windows applications with loosely-coupled designs.
Technical Lead / Engineering Manager
- Sustained 2M requests/minute through BFCM peak with a 3-person team by tuning AWS auto-scaling strategy.
- Built a new internal API plus Retool tooling that sharply reduced support-ticket volume.
- Scaled the engineering org 3 → 15 (including onboarding a new CTO); led knowledge transfer and process improvements.
- Senior Architect on critical-path features for a platform serving 50K+ merchants and hundreds of millions of records.
Technical Lead
- Architected 4 correlated products on microservices, removing cross-team dependencies and improving developer autonomy.
- Owned DevOps end-to-end: CI/CD across Staging/UAT/Prod, plus Azure infrastructure, cost, and security.
- Implemented cloud-native services (CosmosDB, Blob Storage, CDN, App Services, Application Insights); ran R&D, Docker containerization, and on-call.
- Ran twice-monthly tech talks on .NET, Azure, Angular, and software architecture.
Earlier Experience
- Senior Software Engineer & Architect — Lemongrass Consulting (2020)
- .NET / Full-Stack Developer — ClinkIT Solutions (2018–2020): accounting exporter core, OpenID B2B gateway API, 90% Selenium coverage, Cypress E2E.
- Lead Software Engineer — ITMASKINEN (2017–2019)
- Software / .NET Developer — Coding Avenue (2013–2018): payment-gateway integrations (PayPal, Authorize.Net, Nelnet, CashNet) and EdTech modules.
- Senior Software Developer — DataSoft Logic (2013–2016): Medicaid/Medicare billing, EMR, and patient-admission modules.
- Web Developer — HubPort Interactive (2011–2013).
04 Capabilities
Core Skills
Leadership & Org
Architecture
Cloud & DevOps
Engineering
AI & Data
05 Voice
Speaking & Thought Leadership
Multi-year speaker on AI and technology — organization-wide engineering tech talks (twice monthly), public technology conferences, and technical vlogs on DevOps, Azure, and .NET. Active thought leadership on LinkedIn on engineering leadership, AI adoption, and architecture.
06 Credentials
Certifications & Continuous Learning
Earned