Engineering that stays boring under load

I've spent the last eight years close to the parts of a product that break at 3am: payment flows, event pipelines, multi-tenant APIs and the infrastructure underneath them. Most of that work started as someone else's prototype that had outgrown itself.

I work best as an embedded engineer rather than a ticket-taker. That usually means auditing what exists, agreeing on the two or three metrics that actually matter, and then shipping in small, reversible steps until they move.

These days I take on a small number of engagements at a time — typically a platform rebuild, a performance rescue, or a founding-engineer role for a team that needs their first real backend.