Fractional Engineering Leader
You need an engineering manager. Either the team isn't big enough to justify a full-time one, or the search is dragging and delivery is slipping while you wait.
I do the job two or three days a week for teams of five to fifteen engineers: delivery, planning, hiring, and the people work. Usually on AWS, which I learned inside Amazon.
Enquiries welcome for Q4 2026 and Q1 2027
I have been managing people since I was 20 — an operations supervisor with 120 direct reports and six managers by 21 — and technical since I was six. Eleven years in software since: Amazon, the BC provincial government, fintech, and now maritime intelligence for supply chain and defence customers. AWS runs through all of it. I learned it inside Amazon and have been building and running production systems on it ever since. I have shipped on GCP and Azure too — AWS is simply where I go deep.
PREVIOUSLY GSTS · Ether Capital · Maximus Canada · AbeBooks, an Amazon company · Lighthouse Labs
01
You have engineers but no manager, and a founder or CTO is absorbing the job. I take it — including the conversations people avoid.
02
Releases are tense, estimates slip, nobody can say when anything lands. I fix the system around the team rather than asking them to try harder.
03
The fastest delivery improvement is usually the people you already have. I have mentored, coached across offices, and built interview programs from nothing.
04
You need someone senior to look hard at what has been built. I find the decisions that get expensive to reverse, and report in cost and risk rather than opinion.
The leadership engagements start with a paid two-week diagnostic, and you keep the written assessment whether or not we carry on. The architecture audit stands on its own. Choose a shape to see what it costs your week.
MARITIME INTELLIGENCE · 7 ENGINEERS
Took over a team shipping a maritime intelligence platform to supply-chain and defence customers. Introduced CI/CD, coding standards, and AI tooling, and rebuilt how engineering worked with Product, QA, and senior leadership. Releases stopped being an event. [[the numbers — release frequency, escaped defects, cycle time, whatever you can evidence]]
FINTECH · ETHEREUM DATA
Led a dashboard project on Google Cloud turning raw Ethereum data into financial reports the business could act on. Then designed the candidate interview program and ran loops alongside the COO and engineering lead. [[what it changed — time-to-hire, offer acceptance, hires who worked out]]
AMAZON · BOOKFINDER.COM & ABEBOOKS.COM
Lambda, EC2, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and WAF in production. A bot-mitigation programme layered across the stack, Perl sendmail migrated to SES, and legacy on-premise services cut over to CDK pipelines — inside Amazon's own operational bar. [[any scale you can share — requests/sec, cost reduced, incidents avoided]]
PUBLIC SECTOR · HEALTH INSURANCE BC
ScrumMaster on a greenfield build for the Ministry, alongside a monitoring and alerting overhaul for critical applications. Delivery under procurement, compliance, and legacy Perl — where "just move faster" is not on the menu. [[outcome]]
[[a testimonial — specific beats glowing. "He told us the thing the team had been avoiding for a year" outperforms "great to work with". Ask a GSTS engineer and a stakeholder.]]
Today I lead the team building a maritime intelligence platform used by supply chain and security & defence customers. [[one clause on how fractional work fits — alongside this role, or what you're moving toward]]
I have been technical since I was six — building computers and websites long before either was a job — and managing people since I was 20. I started in technical support, and six promotions took me to operations supervisor at 21, running 120 direct reports and six managers. Every job since has carried a coaching, mentoring, or supervisory role. I studied finance before any of the software, which is why I tend to argue for engineering work in the language of cost and risk rather than elegance.
That includes all five years at Amazon before I worked in tech at all. Tier 2 support, then lead on the customer success team: writing policy, running the coaching program, doing QA reviews across offices, and travelling internationally to train other trainers.
The engineering career started in the same building. I moved onto BookFinder.com and AbeBooks.com — Python and Flask, bot mitigation with WAF and Lambda, legacy stacks cut over to CDK pipelines — then Perl and Java for the BC government as ScrumMaster on a greenfield Ministry project, Django and React on Ethereum data at Ether Capital, mentoring at Lighthouse Labs, and now React, Node, and AWS on a maritime platform: first as a senior engineer, then as the manager.
Most engineering managers are engineers who pick up the people work late. I did it in the other order, and at a scale most never see. That is why I think most delivery problems are not technical: they are a team that does not agree on what "done" means, does not trust the release, or does not feel safe saying the estimate is wrong. Those are fixable, and fixing them is cheaper than hiring.
I'm in Victoria, BC, on Pacific time. Before software I ran a photography company for eight years, which is still how I think about craft: get the light right and you need far less fixing afterwards.
Thirty minutes, no pitch. Tell me what is going wrong and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person to help.
Prefer to write first? A paragraph on the situation is plenty.