Build an Elite Engineering Culture. 👥
I conduct rigorous technical interviews, establish strict PR review standards, and mentor junior developers into senior roles. Power up your team and reduce your management overhead, so you can focus entirely on sales and distribution.
Empowering engineering teams at venture-backed startups
Your code is only as good as the culture that writes it.
A bad technical hire doesn't just cost a $130k salary, it costs months of runway, broken architecture, and endless bug fixes.
The Great Talker Problem
You can't tell the difference between a great engineer and a great interviewer. Generic LeetCode playbooks fail to identify true problem-solvers.
Unreviewed Spaghetti Code
Junior developers are merging unreviewed code straight into production, "LGTM" rubber-stamping is now your entire PR review process.
Collapsing Under Its Own Weight
Without a bar for excellence, bugs compound and the system becomes fragile faster than your team can patch it.
Who this is for
Hiring and mentoring are the same problem seen at two different moments.
Founders making their first technical hires
You cannot reliably tell a strong engineer from a confident one, and the interview loop you copied from a large company is testing for something your startup does not need.
What changes: An interview process built from work your team actually does, and a written recommendation you can hold a decision to after the enthusiasm has worn off.
Teams shipping fragile work
Code merges without meaningful review, defects reach customers, and the people writing it have nobody senior enough to learn from in-house.
What changes: Standards enforced by tooling rather than by memory, and engineers who are measurably better six months later because somebody senior reviewed their work.
What you get
The goal is a process you keep, not a dependency on me being in the room.
An interview process for your stack
A take-home or pairing exercise built from problems your team has actually solved, plus a scorecard that makes two interviewers comparable.
A written hire or no-hire recommendation
With the reasoning attached, per candidate. Written down, because the case for a marginal hire always sounds better in the week you made it.
Engineering standards
Review rules, branch model, and what has to be true before something deploys, enforced in CI rather than in somebody's memory of the conversation.
Mentorship sessions
Regular pairing and design review with your engineers, aimed at the specific things standing between them and the next level.
How the engagement runs
It starts by reading what you have already done, because the pattern is usually visible there.
1. Baseline
I read your recent pull requests and your last few interview loops. Where quality is being lost is normally visible in both, and it is normally the same cause.
2. The technical stage
I design the technical round around work your team does and sit the final one. Algorithm puzzles reliably identify people who have practised algorithm puzzles.
3. Standards
Review rules, branching and a deployment checklist, written down and then enforced automatically, since a standard nobody can bypass is the only kind that holds.
4. Ongoing
I stay as the senior reviewer on architectural changes and run regular sessions with your engineers, which is the part that compounds.
From the workbench
How a hiring process fails without anyone noticing
A bad technical hire is rarely a bad candidate. It is usually a process that measured the wrong thing, and the failure is legible before the offer goes out:
| What you see | What it usually is | How to check it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone passes the technical round | The exercise tests familiarity with a puzzle format rather than judgement about a real problem. | Ask what the last rejected candidate got wrong. If nobody can say specifically, the round is not discriminating. |
| The strongest interviewer disagrees and is overruled | There is no written bar, so the decision defaults to enthusiasm and availability. | Ask for the written reason behind the last two hires. Compare them. |
| New hires take months to ship anything | Onboarding depends on someone senior having time, and the codebase has no path in. | Ask when the last hire merged their first change, and what it was. |
| Reviews that say LGTM | Review is a formality because nobody has said what it is for, so it costs time and catches nothing. | Read the last ten approved reviews. Count how many asked a question. |
The second is the one worth fixing first. A written bar makes every later disagreement cheaper, and it is the only one of these that costs nothing to introduce.
FAQs
Yes. I design custom take-home assignments and run the final technical and architectural interviews myself, bypassing generic algorithm puzzles in favor of real PR reviews and system design.
Yes. I establish strict PR standards and CI hygiene rules, then mentor your existing junior and mid-level developers through pair-programming and async feedback until senior-level output becomes the default.
A hiring scorecard with a clear hire or no-hire recommendation per candidate, documented engineering SOPs for PRs and deployments, and weekly mentorship syncs with your team.
Hiring and mentorship runs on the same monthly tiers shown above, from async scorecard reviews up to embedded weekly involvement.
Ready to stop guessing in interviews?
A bad engineering hire in an early-stage team is not a salary you can recover. It is months of decisions made on top of the wrong foundation, and those are the expensive part.
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