Product engineering

Build is product engineering: I design and build SaaS products, web platforms and APIs end to end, as one senior engineer who owns the architecture, the code, the cloud set-up and the handover. It is for founders and product teams in the US, UK, EU, Gulf, Japan and Korea who want software they can keep building on, not a prototype they will replace.

Most Build work starts in one of three places: a first version of a new product, a new area inside a product that already has users, or an old system that the business depends on and nobody wants to touch.

You need a first version of a SaaS product. The MVP Sprint is a fixed-price build of the smallest version a first customer can use.

You need a custom SaaS platform, dashboard or internal tool. SaaS development and web platforms covers new platforms and the APIs and integrations between them.

An old system holds the business back. Legacy modernization moves it to a modern stack in reversible stages while it keeps serving customers.

An old website or project needs a better version. Website redesign and project refactor rebuilds the design and the code, and keeps every URL or redirects it in one hop.

Your backend is, or should be, Laravel. Laravel development and upgrades builds new apps and upgrades old ones one major version at a time.

Your front end has to be fast and found by search. Next.js development and migration builds new front ends and moves React single-page apps, older Next.js sites and PHP templates onto Next.js.

Your product has to talk to payments, CRMs or other tools. API development and integrations builds APIs and integrations with retries, signed webhooks and alerts.

Your editors have outgrown their CMS. Custom CMS and headless content platforms builds editorial platforms and migrates WordPress or older CMS content with every URL kept.

The product is live and needs looking after. The maintenance and support retainer keeps it patched, upgraded and monitored for a monthly fee.

It suits a founder with a validated idea and a first customer in sight, a product team adding a major area alongside an existing platform, and a company running a PHP application or a single-page app that is holding the business back.

It does not suit new brochure sites, WordPress theme work, native iOS or Android apps, or a project that needs a large agency team from the first day. If the idea has no first customer yet, an architecture review is a better use of the money than a build.

"We need something real before the next raise, and hiring a senior engineer will take longer than building it." "Every feature takes longer than the last, and nobody can say why." "The old system works, mostly, but it runs on one server and one person knows how to deploy it." "We changed agencies twice and now we own code nobody understands."

The common thread is that the foundations were skipped or have aged. The work is to put them in: a data model that fits the next stage, authentication and roles done once and properly, automated tests and deploys, and documentation a new engineer can follow.

Whatever the starting point, you get working software deployed to your own cloud account, its source code in your repository, tests that run on every change, a CI/CD pipeline with staging and production, API documentation, and a written runbook with a handover session. Intellectual property is assigned to you on payment.

The detail differs by offer. The MVP Sprint is a first version with a fixed scope. SaaS development and web platforms covers new platforms, dashboards, internal tools and integrations. Legacy modernization moves an aging system in reversible stages while the old one keeps serving customers. Website redesign and project refactor rebuilds an old website or project into a better version, keeping its URLs or redirecting each one in a single hop. The Laravel, Next.js, API, CMS and maintenance offers listed below go deeper on one stack or one kind of job.

With a small, fixed-price first step that ends in a written outcome. For a new product it is the scoping week of the MVP Sprint: we cut the feature list to what a first customer needs, write acceptance criteria and agree the price and dates. For an existing system it is a modernization assessment: I read the code, map the data and integrations, and write down what to keep, rewrite and retire.

I don't publish prices on this page; the first step is quoted after a short call or a written brief through the contact page. The written outcome is yours to use whatever you decide next.

Build work for teams in the United States usually runs on the East Coast morning, which lines up with my evening, with written updates covering the rest of the day. For the United Kingdom your morning falls in my afternoon, so a daily call early in your day is easy, and a data processing agreement comes with the engagement wherever I handle personal data. For South Korea and other teams taking a product abroad, I design for the destination market's privacy rules in the same pass as the build, because retrofitting them later costs more. Invoices are in your currency, per milestone or monthly; each market page has the detail.