Work With Me

Most of the expensive problems I see in engineering teams aren't "we can't scale." They're the opposite – a system built for a scale it will never reach. The complexity was added for good reasons, or fashionable ones, and now it costs money to run, costs time to maintain, and makes every change slower than it should be.

I help teams find where their architecture is more complicated than the problem requires – and what that complexity is actually costing them.

Who this is for

You're a tech lead, engineering manager, or founder at a company that isn't operating at hyperscale. Your product serves real users at real-but-normal scale. And one of these is true:

• Your cloud bill has grown faster than your traffic, and no one can quite explain why.
• You're about to add something complex – a message broker, a cache layer, sharding, another service – and you want an honest second opinion on whether you actually need it.
• Delivery has slowed down. The system has more moving parts than the team can comfortably hold in their heads.
• You inherited an architecture and you're not sure which parts are load-bearing and which are there because someone once read a blog post about how Google does it.

If you genuinely operate at the scale that justifies heavy distributed infrastructure, I'm not your person – and I'll tell you that in the first email rather than waste your time.

This is advisory work: I review, measure, and recommend. I don't do implementation or ongoing retainers.

What you get

Advisory Call. A single focused call – typically 60 to 90 minutes – for one sharp question you need answered soon. Good for a build-vs-skip decision on a specific piece of infrastructure, a cost or performance problem you want a second read on, or a "we're about to do X – talk us out of it or confirm it" gut-check.

You send the context ahead of time: the question, a rough sketch of the system, whatever numbers you have. I come to the call already up to speed, so we spend the time on the actual problem, not background. You leave with a clear recommendation and the reasoning behind it – and afterwards I send a short written summary you can take back to your team.

Lean Architecture Review. A deeper engagement on one concrete question – a scaling decision, a cost problem, a performance issue, or a straight "do we actually need this?" call. You get a written report: where the system is doing more than it needs to, what that's costing you in money and team time, what I'd simplify, what I'd leave alone, and the reasoning behind each call. Then we walk through it together, so you can act on it.

I work from your system's real numbers – load, cost, latency – not from opinion or from how a problem is usually solved. The recommendation for your situation depends on your situation, and that's what the report is grounded in.

How it works

1. Get in touch – tell me the problem in a few sentences.
2. Scoping call – 30 minutes, free, to check it's a good fit and agree on the one question worth answering.
3. The work – I dig in, measure where it helps, and write it up.
4. Readout – we go through the findings and your options together.

Every engagement is scoped individually – tell me what you're dealing with and I'll come back with a clear plan for it. Work is remote; I'm based in Warsaw and have worked across time zones.

About me

I'm Andrei – a software engineer with 13 years of experience building and operating real systems. I write about pragmatic, evidence-based system design here on The Sane Engineer. My bias is toward simple architectures that match real requirements, and against complexity adopted because it's fashionable.

I take a small number of engagements at a time, alongside my main work, so each one gets real attention.

Get in touch

Tell me what you're dealing with – a few sentences is plenty. I read every message myself and reply within 48 hours.