Quick Start
For hiring managers and clients: everything you need in two minutes. The installation guide, for hiring me.
What You Get
A senior technical leader who can:
- Own delivery for a programme with a date, a budget and stakeholders who disagree
- Design the architecture and defend it to engineers and to the board
- Run the engineering team, having done it as CTO at two agencies with up to 20 people
- Work fluently in payments and blockchain infrastructure, from card tokenisation to Ethereum Layer 2
- Write it all up to a standard that gets signed off first time
Prerequisites
You are a good fit if you have:
- A technically complex product in payments, stablecoin infrastructure, fintech, SaaS or developer tooling
- Delivery that needs owning rather than observing
- A remote-first culture
- Appetite for someone who will tell you when the plan does not work
Installation (Hiring Process)
Email introduction
Send an email to consult@jamesaindow.co.uk with:
- Brief company and product overview
- The delivery or architecture problem
- Contract or permanent
- Approximate timeline
Discovery call
30 minutes on:
- Technical and organisational complexity
- Where delivery is currently stuck
- Team structure and reporting lines
- What success looks like
Proposal
I send you:
- Scope of work
- Timeline
- Rate or compensation
- How I would approach the first 30 days
Deployment
Onboard and start shipping
Previous Deployments
- Mastercard (Nov 2025–present): senior contract, leading the documentation and UX content overhaul for MDES Manager, the global card tokenisation platform. 379-page guide consolidated to roughly 200 pages in DITA XML, 100+ product screens, AI assistant proof of concept
- Starknet (2022–2023): sole owner of docs.starknet.io and cairo-lang.org through the Ethereum Layer 2 testnet-to-mainnet transition
- Klevu (2019–2021): senior solutions architect, integration architecture and the full technical documentation estate for an AI-powered site search platform
- CTO, Folk Digital (UK) and Shero Commerce (US): platform architecture, DevOps and CI/CD, delivery standards, distributed teams of up to 20
- Agency delivery: enterprise e-commerce for Wedgwood, Hackett London, Turnbull & Asser, MADE.COM and Pernod Ricard
What the First Six Months Look Like
Month 1: delivery and architecture assessment, stakeholder map, the real state of the programme in writing, priorities agreed.
Months 2 to 3: cadence established, decisions documented, the first releases out under the new process, the worst structural risk retired.
Months 4 to 6: the team running at a predictable pace, architecture decisions holding, escalation happening early enough to act on, and the work carrying on without me in the room.
Next Steps
→ Delivery track record for the leadership history → Payments and blockchain contracts for recent infrastructure work → Contact me to discuss a role