Architecture & Audits
Independent consultancy work: architecture reviews, code and platform audits, and solutions architecture for product companies. This is the work clients bring me in for when they need somebody who can read the system and then tell them the truth about it.
Architecture Reviews
What a review covers:
- Platform and integration architecture, including where the coupling actually is rather than where the diagram says it is
- Data flows, ownership boundaries and failure modes
- DevOps, CI/CD, environment parity and release risk
- Scalability under the load the business expects, not the load the current traffic suggests
- Security and compliance posture at the architectural level
What the client gets: a written assessment with findings ranked by risk and cost to fix, a target architecture, and a sequenced route from one to the other. Written so the CTO and the finance director can both act on it.
Why the written output matters. An architecture review that lives in somebody's head or in a two-hour call gets forgotten by the next planning cycle. The document is the deliverable. It has to survive contact with people who were not in the room.
Code and Platform Audits
Audits usually start with one of three questions: can this codebase carry the roadmap, what did we actually buy in that acquisition, or why does every release hurt.
What I look at:
- Code quality, test coverage and the real cost of change in the hot paths
- Dependency health, upgrade debt and abandoned libraries
- Build and deployment pipeline, including how long it takes to get a fix to production
- Documentation and knowledge concentration, meaning who has to be awake for the system to be fixable
- Delivery process, estimation accuracy and where the time is going
Tone of the output: direct. Clients are paying for an assessment, not reassurance. I flag what is fine as clearly as I flag what is not, because a report where everything is a problem is as useless as one where nothing is.
Klevu · Senior Solutions Architect (2019–2021)
AI-powered site search for e-commerce, sold to merchants and implemented by agencies. I came in on the architecture and implementation side, covering how the product got into complex retail stacks and what had to be true for it to work.
The problem: the platform was capable, and every implementation was different. Merchants, agencies and in-house developers were all integrating along different paths, and the fastest way to unblock them was not more support headcount.
What I owned:
- Integration architecture across Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and custom platforms
- Solution design with merchants and implementation partners, including pre-sales technical scoping
- The full technical documentation estate: integration guides, Search, Recommendations and Analytics API references, JavaScript SDK guides, merchant configuration and tuning
- Platform setup on GitBook, information architecture, contribution workflow and search
- Feeding recurring integration failures back into the product and engineering roadmap
Where my background mattered: I had already spent years delivering enterprise e-commerce for retail brands. I knew what a merchant's stack looks like from the inside, which edge cases were coming, and why an integration that works in a demo falls over against a real catalogue.
Outcome: agencies could integrate without a support ticket for every project, onboarding time dropped, and the technical content became something sales could put in front of a prospect.
Consultancy Engagements
Independent architecture and delivery consulting, with an emphasis on Web3, SaaS and technical infrastructure.
Typical engagement shapes:
- Fixed-scope architecture or code audit with a written report and a follow-up session
- Solution design for a specific integration or migration
- Delivery review where a programme is late and nobody can agree on why
- Interim technical leadership while a client hires permanently
How I price it: by scope, agreed up front. I would rather turn down work than take a mandate that cannot succeed.
Technical Ground
Engineering:
- Languages: PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Node.js
- Frameworks: React, Next.js, Laravel, Express
- Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD
- Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis
Domains:
- Enterprise e-commerce, ERP, PIM and fulfilment integration
- Payment integration and card tokenisation
- Layer 2 blockchain protocols, smart contracts, ZK proof systems
- Site search, recommendations and merchandising platforms
Reading, not shipping: Solidity, Cairo, Rust. Enough to review, document and hold a technical conversation, not enough to claim I would ship production contracts.
Next
→ Delivery Track Record for the CTO and agency delivery history → Tools & Platforms for the working stack → Contact to discuss an audit or review