FAQ

General Questions

Your last two contracts were documentation-led. Are you an engineer or a writer?

Engineer, and I have been one for twenty years. Developer, lead developer, CTO at two agencies, senior solutions architect.

The recent contracts were content-led because that was the work available in the domains I wanted to move into, and because it is unusual for someone with a CTO background to do it well. At Mastercard that put me inside a global payments platform, working with product owners and engineering on a live tokenisation product. At Starknet it put me at protocol level on an Ethereum Layer 2. Both were delivery engagements with content as the artefact.

What I am doing now is going back to owning the delivery and the architecture, in the payments and stablecoin space those contracts took me into.

What makes you different from other delivery leads and solutions architects?

Most: can run a plan, manage stakeholders, and keep a programme moving.

Me: all of that, plus:

• I have been the CTO, so I have carried the commercial consequences of technical decisions rather than only advising on them
• I read the codebase myself. I do not need an engineer to translate their own system for me
• I have run distributed teams of up to 20 across time zones
• I can produce the written architecture or delivery document that gets signed off, instead of outsourcing that step
• I have worked at both ends of modern payments: card tokenisation at Mastercard, Layer 2 infrastructure at Starknet

In practice: I ask better questions in week one, and the plan I hand you is one you can act on without a follow-up meeting to explain it.

Can you work with [specific technology]?

In my wheelhouse (payments infrastructure, tokenisation, blockchain and Layer 2, enterprise e-commerce, SaaS, APIs, developer tooling): yes, effective immediately.

Adjacent (new language, similar domain): yes, one to two weeks to get fluent.

Completely new: probably, with a two to four week ramp-up while I build domain context.

Honest assessment: I learn fast, particularly where the material is technically hard. I will not pretend to expertise I do not have.

What about stablecoin infrastructure specifically?

It sits directly between the two things I have most recently worked on. Card tokenisation at Mastercard covers the payments network side: issuers, processors, PSPs, and the operational reality of moving value through regulated institutions. Starknet covers the on-chain side at protocol level. Stablecoin infrastructure is where those two meet, and that is why I am targeting it.

Work Arrangements

Contract or permanent?

Both. Contract suits me for contained scope at a senior level, and I am open to permanent for the right role.

Also workable:

• Long-term contracts, six months and up
• Interim technical leadership while you hire permanently
• Part-time permanent, 20 to 30 hours a week

Not interested in:

• On-site requirements beyond occasional travel
• Agencies looking to resell my services

What's your rate?

Contract: from £600 a day, consistent across senior payments, fintech and crypto infrastructure engagements. Open to discussion on long-term or complex scopes.

Permanent: competitive expectations based on scope and level.

→ Email me to discuss your specific situation

What's your availability?

Status: available for new engagements

Hours: flexible. UK and European time zones preferred, US East Coast workable

Capacity:

• Full-time contract: one client
• Part-time: two to three clients
• Permanent: full focus on one company

Startups or established companies?

Both, and they need different things.

Startups (under 50 people):

• ✅ High impact, architecture and delivery shaped from the start
• ✅ My range across engineering, DevOps and delivery covers several roles at once
• ⚠️ You need to be comfortable with me saying no to scope

Established companies:

• ✅ Resources, process and clear objectives
• ✅ The kind of stakeholder complexity I am good at
• ⚠️ Slower decision cycles

Sweet spot: payments and infrastructure companies with product-market fit, scaling delivery past the point where informal process holds.

Technical Questions

Will you still be hands-on?

Yes, at review depth. I read code, review architecture, and debug a broken pipeline rather than filing a ticket about it. I am not looking for a role where I ship features full time, and I would be a poor use of budget in one.

What does your architecture work cover?

• Platform and integration architecture
• Data flows, ownership boundaries, failure modes
• DevOps, CI/CD, environment strategy, release risk
• Scalability against realistic load
• Code and platform audits, including due diligence
• Written assessments with findings ranked by risk and cost to fix

More detail on Architecture & Audits.

How do you handle subject matter experts who are too busy?

Reality: senior engineers are always busy, and I do not expect them to do my work for me.

1. Do the homework first. Read the code, run the product, understand the basics
2. Ask specific questions. Not "explain this" but "I think X works like Y, where am I wrong"
3. Use their time well. A focused 30 minutes beats a rambling two hours
4. Show work in progress. Give people something to react to
5. Earn the engagement. Demonstrate you understand the system and access stops being a problem

Can you build the infrastructure, not just direct it?

Yes. Docs-as-code pipelines, CI/CD, deployment automation, custom sites in React and Next.js, linting and validation, search integration, analytics. At Starknet I built the documentation platform and deployment pipeline myself as well as writing the content.

Process Questions

What's your typical process on a new engagement?

How do you measure success?

Quantitative:

• Predictable delivery against agreed dates
• Deployment frequency and time to restore
• Defect and rework rates
• Support burden on engineering

Qualitative:

• Whether decisions stay made
• Whether bad news arrives early
• Whether the team can operate when I am not in the room

Philosophy: if the team ships predictably and the architecture is still defensible in a year, the job was done.

Logistics

Where are you based?

Location: UK, south of England Work style: fully remote, occasional travel fine

Time zones: UK and Europe primary, US East Coast workable, async by default

What's your notice period?

Contract: typically two to four weeks, negotiable on urgency

Permanent: standard notice applies

Do you sign NDAs?

Yes, reasonable ones.

Won't sign: non-competes that shut me out of an entire industry.

Still Have Questions?

Questions I Ask You

Before we work together I want to understand:

1. What is the delivery problem? Late, unclear, under-resourced, or all three
2. Who owns the decisions? And who thinks they do
3. What is the current state? Greenfield, legacy, or a migration halfway through
4. What does success look like? Measures, goals, timeline
5. How does the team work? Remote, async, meeting culture, reporting lines

Why these matter: most delivery failures are organisational before they are technical. I would rather find that out in the first conversation than the third month.