A senior architect inside your team on a steady cadence - reviewing designs before they ship, setting standards that hold under delivery pressure, and owning the technical calls that are too expensive to get wrong.
This is the right shape when you have capable engineers but no one owning the architecture - a startup between funding rounds, an SMB whose product outgrew its first design, or an agency that needs a senior backstop on a critical build. You need the judgment of a staff-level architect or CTO, but not forty hours of it.
I embed with the team: I attend the design discussions that matter, review RFCs in writing, and hold a recurring slot your engineers can bring anything to. I deliberately take on at most two embedded engagements at a time, so each one gets real attention.
Read the code, the docs, and the org. Interview the engineers. Surface the load-bearing decisions and the risks nobody has written down.
Agree the operating rhythm: review slots, decision-record format, a prioritized architecture backlog alongside your delivery work.
Reviews, standards, and decisions accumulate. I reassess scope with you quarterly - up, down, or hand off to a full-time hire I help you find.
A contractor delivers tickets; this engagement delivers judgment and direction. The output is decisions, standards, reviews, and a team that levels up - work that a staff engineer or CTO would do, at a fraction of the commitment.
Engagements are scoped on the intro call - pricing depends on cadence and scope, and is quoted as a flat monthly retainer so there are no surprise invoices. If the fit isn't right, I'll say so on the call.
Yes, where it's the highest-leverage use of the time - reference implementations, tooling for standards, spikes that de-risk a decision. The engagement is not a substitute for delivery capacity.
That's the goal. Everything is documented and owned by your team from day one, and when you're ready for a full-time hire I help you write the spec, interview, and hand over cleanly.
Three months. Architecture work compounds; anything shorter is better served by a fixed-scope review.
A 30-minute intro call - your systems, your team, and an honest read on whether this shape is right.