I embed as a senior software architect with your team - reviewing designs, setting standards, and keeping delivery on pace. You get staff-level judgment at the cadence you actually need, from a few hours a month to two days a week.
Every engagement is one of three shapes. The specialties above run through all of them - standalone or combined as your needs change.
Ongoing, embedded technical leadership - architecture review, roadmap input, hiring support, and a steady hand on the big calls. One to two days a week.
An independent, fixed-scope review of your architecture, code health, and scaling risk - for funding rounds, acquisitions, or your own peace of mind. Written report, defended in person.
A senior sounding board for founders and engineering leads - a recurring session plus async access for the decisions that keep you up at night. A few hours a month.
Every significant call is a short written record - context, options, trade-offs, decision. Your team inherits the reasoning, not just the outcome.
Deliverables are design docs, working standards, and reviewed code - things your engineers use the next day, not decks that age in a drive.
Written reviews and a predictable cadence beat standing meetings. Synchronous time is reserved for the calls that genuinely need it.
The goal is a team that no longer needs me. Standards, docs, and ownership transfer to your engineers from day one - no dependency by design.
The first two weeks are spent reading - the systems, the org, the roadmap. I surface the load-bearing decisions before changing anything.
Recurring design reviews, standards that fit your tooling, and a shared backlog of architecture work. Delivery keeps moving.
Decision records, design docs, and review notes accumulate into an architecture your team can navigate without me in the room.
When you outgrow fractional - a full-time hire, a stabilized platform - you inherit a running system, not a dependency.
I'm Kelvin, and Talvigen is my fractional architecture practice. I've been building SaaS since 2008 - across SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, and from on-prem through hybrid to fully cloud-hosted. AWS- and Azure-certified as a solutions architect, and still hands-on in the code.
When you work with Talvigen, you work with the person on this page. No account managers, no junior staff learning on your budget.
A 30-minute intro call - your context, your constraints, and whether a fractional engagement is the right fit. No pitch deck.