A head of engineering who writes the rules, reviews the designs, and runs the agents. One or two days a week.
For companies that have more code than leadership: a seed or growth-stage team shipping with AI agents, or a small trading operation whose systems have outgrown the person who started them. I set the engineering standards, sign off on designs before they are built, review the builds, and keep the decisions written down so they survive the next hire and the next session.
$6,000 a month for one day a week. $12,000 for two. Book a 30-minute scoping call.
What the days are spent on
Standards and rails
- The constitution your coding agents work under, and the tests that pin what must never happen
- Design sign-off before implementation; review of every build against its design
- Release discipline: what ships, when, and what the operator should expect to see
People and process
- Hiring, onboarding and mentoring; I managed teams of up to fifteen engineers and built the promotion framework a 345-engineer department used
- Incident reviews that end in a dated decision record, not a chat thread
- The weekly cadence a small team needs and no more
Architecture and vendors
- Services, data, deployment and monitoring decisions, with the alternatives rejected on record
- Broker, exchange and market-data integrations, and the reconciliation that keeps them honest
- The build-versus-buy calls, made with someone who has paid for both
Shapes and price
One day a week: $6,000 a month. Standards, sign-off and review for a team that already has its hands on the keyboard.
Two days a week: $12,000 a month. The above, plus hiring, incident ownership and the vendor and broker work.
Interim, near full-time: quoted by the month. Ad hoc: $250 an hour.
Three-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice. Remote, with on-site days in Chicago when they earn their cost. Most engagements start with a Rails Review, and its fee is credited against the first three months.
Not included: writing most of the code myself. The point of the role is that the rules, the reviews and the records hold whether the code is written by your engineers or by an agent.
How to judge whether I am the right one
Ask me for a specific architecture decision with the options I rejected, for my last three production incidents and what rule each one became, and for the cases where I would tell a team not to use an agent at all. Those are the right questions for anyone selling this role in 2026, and the answers are on the record: 87 decision records, a kill switch that forgot it was pressed and the fix that made it remember, a function that treated silence as permission, and a strategy shut down on evidence I had committed to before I saw it. Part one has the stories.
Before 2026: Director of Trading System Development at the New York Stock Exchange, principal architect at Envestnet taking a monolith to services, and six years at Chicago Trading Company managing market-connectivity, FPGA and DevOps teams.
Start with a scoping call
Thirty minutes on what the team is building, what keeps breaking, and what you need a head of engineering to own. You leave with a proposed shape and a start date, or a straight answer.
Nothing on this site is investment advice.