Rebuilding the bus whilst it's driving down the road.
Pragmatic Interim CTO and Fractional Technical Leadership for venture-backed scale-ups, private equity funds, and founder-led businesses navigating high-stakes transition.
The Munci Philosophy
Most technology advice comes from people who haven't carried the pager or managed a multi-million-pound engineering P&L. Here is how I actually operate.
The Excellence Paradox
The companies with the most commercial success often have the messiest codebases. Academic purity doesn't create market value; speed of learning does. I fix tech debt where it protects revenue, not where it satisfies dogma.
Quietly Strangling the Monolith
Ground-up rewrites are where startups go to die. I apply the Strangler Fig pattern: carving out clean, containerised microservices slice by slice while the legacy engine keeps the revenue flowing uninterrupted.
Treat Developers Like Adults
High trust, crystal-clear business context, and radical autonomy. I eliminate micromanagement rituals, replace ceremony with automated CI/CD pipelines, and give senior talent the safety to deliver their best work.
Commercial Pragmatism
Zero resume-driven development. Every architectural choice, cloud migration, and hiring decision must directly support customer retention, gross margins, or investment enterprise valuation.
Clear, Predictable Technology Leadership
Whether you need hands-on operational leadership through a crisis or a rapid forensic audit of an outsourced team, my engagements are transparent, high-impact, and strictly Outside IR35.
Interim CTO
Full-time leadership (3 to 9 months) during turnaround, founder succession, or scale-up acceleration ahead of an institutional funding round or sale.
- Full organizational and delivery leadership
- Rebuilding release cadences and engineering culture
- Board-level strategic reporting and CapEx/OpEx management
- Hands-on architectural remediation without halting feature delivery
Fractional CTO
1 to 3 days per week of veteran executive direction for growing businesses that need senior firepower without the cost of a full-time executive.
- Mentoring existing technical leads and heads of department
- Architectural governance and vendor/agency management
- Sprint alignment and roadmap prioritization
- Investor and board advisory representation
72-Hour Health Check
A rapid, forensic inspection of your code, cloud architecture, and delivery pipeline. Built for founders and CEOs who need an objective, unvarnished view of their engineering reality.
- Repo inspection, test coverage, and tech debt analysis
- Cloud infrastructure & AWS cost reduction opportunities
- Team/agency delivery velocity & key-person risk audit
- 3-Page Traffic Light Report + 90-day fix roadmap
- 60-minute founder/board debrief call
Technical Due Diligence
Investor-grade technical audits for PE funds, angel syndicates, and acquiring corporations to uncover hidden technical liabilities pre-deal.
- IP ownership and open-source license compliance check
- Architecture scalability and infrastructure resilience
- Cybersecurity baseline & ISO 27001 readiness review
- Clear Red Flag Report and valuation adjustment guidance
Rapid Forensic Audit Without Disrupting Delivery
A predictable 3-day investigation conducted strictly via read-only access - diagnosing root technical liabilities before they threaten commercial growth.
Read-Only Forensic Audit
Direct inspection of Git commit history, CI/CD pipeline health, AWS/cloud IAM and cost ledgers, and test coverage.
Friction & Risk Synthesis
Forensic mapping of key-person dependencies, architectural single points of failure, tech debt accrual, and vendor lock-in risks.
Dossier & Strategic Debrief
Delivery of the 3-Page Traffic Light Report, a prioritized 90-day remediation roadmap, and a 60-minute board/founder debrief call.
Deliverable Sample: The 72-Hour Traffic Light Diagnostic
Forensic findings and board-level risk classifications extracted from live client engagements.
Battle-Tested Track Record
From scaling hyper-growth hardware platforms to safeguarding safety-critical defence systems, my leadership delivers measurable commercial outcomes.
- Zero downtime during COVID-19 remote schooling surges
- Engineered team scaled from 4 to 18 high-performing engineers
- Successfully steered technical due diligence through acquisition by The Key
Technical Mandate & Architecture
- Replaced monolithic on-premise infrastructure with resilient AWS services
- Formed factory automated test rigs and manufacturing data telemetry
- Recognised on the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 for hyper-growth
Technical Mandate & Architecture
- Expanded capacity from 1 constrained pipeline to 3 concurrent streams
- Supplied mission-critical systems to the RAF and partner air forces
- Upheld strict safety-critical assurance and security governance
Technical Mandate & Architecture
Industry Talks & Technical Concepts
Regular speaker at national and regional software conferences, addressing the human and architectural challenges of scaling systems under pressure.
Quietly Strangling the Monolith
A pragmatic deep dive into decomposing legacy systems without risking the business. Demonstrating how to use the Strangler Fig pattern, event interceptors, and AWS Fargate to migrate high-traffic production workloads incrementally.
The Excellence Paradox
An exploration of why hyper-growth commercial winners often struggle with messy codebases, and why dogmatic engineering purity is often the enemy of product-market fit. How engineering leaders can reconcile commercial reality with technical health.
Digital Lincoln & Code Club
Chair of Digital Lincoln, curating regional meetups and knowledge-sharing sessions for 500+ software engineers, engineering managers, and local technology founders. Active STEM Ambassador and Code Club volunteer.
I have spent over 20 years building software systems and the engineering teams behind them.
I get brought in when a company hits a critical inflection point: when engineering delivery has stalled, technical debt is threatening business growth, or an organisation needs professionalising ahead of an acquisition or fundraising round.
My background spans the full spectrum of software delivery - from managing continuous industrial systems at TATA Steel Europe and scaling venture-backed SaaS platforms to acquisition exits (ScholarPack exit to The Key), through to engineering mission-planning systems supplying the UK Ministry of Defence.
I don't borrow generic consulting playbooks or trendy buzzwords. I build pragmatic frameworks from what actually works in the trenches - combining calm, first-principles problem solving, high empathy for engineers, and uncompromising commercial accountability.
Continuous 24/7 heavy industrial systems, fail-safe architecture, and zero-tolerance operational resilience.
Zero-downtime AWS Fargate migration during term breaks, scaled team 4 to 18, steered acquisition exit to The Key.
Founded software engineering department from 0 to 40+ engineers across 4 countries; hyper-growth CleanTech IoT.
Hands-on turnaround leadership, PE technical due diligence audits, and defence mission systems delivery.
Ready to rebuild your engineering momentum?
Whether you need a 72-hour diagnostic health check, fractional leadership to unblock delivery, or a veteran Interim CTO to guide a turnaround, let's have an honest discussion.
Send a Confidential Enquiry
Prefer to send a written brief before jumping on a call? Outline your situation below and I will respond directly within one business day.