Software Architecture Consulting
Design and evolve systems that scale. No rewrites, no downtime surprises, and no architectural regret. I help engineering teams move from fragile to robust, from tangled to composable.
When Architecture Becomes the Bottleneck
Most engineering problems that feel like people problems or process problems are actually architecture problems. When the codebase is too coupled to change safely, when deployments require coordinating five teams, when adding a feature requires touching twenty files: the architecture is the constraint, and no amount of stand-ups or sprints will fix it.
Software architecture consulting is the work of understanding why a system is shaped the way it is, identifying where that shape is creating friction, and designing an evolutionary path toward something better, without stopping the business to do it.
This work sits at the intersection of technical depth and business judgment. The best architectural decisions aren't the most sophisticated ones. They're the ones that fit your team's capabilities, your timeline, and your product's trajectory. That's what I help you find.
When You Need Architecture Consulting
Architecture problems rarely announce themselves clearly. They show up as slow delivery, brittle deployments, or engineers reluctant to touch certain parts of the system. Here are the situations where I can make the most immediate difference.
Your monolith is hitting its limits
Deployments take hours, a bug in one area breaks everything else, and your engineers are afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase. Your architecture has become the ceiling on your team's productivity and your product's reliability. It's time to think structurally.
Preparing for 10x traffic growth
A product launch, a major partnership, or a marketing push is on the horizon. If you're not confident your current infrastructure will hold up, architecture consulting identifies the bottlenecks before they become incidents and designs the path to genuine scalability.
Inconsistent APIs across teams
Multiple teams have built services independently and the result is a patchwork of incompatible conventions, duplicated logic, and integration headaches. A cohesive API strategy and domain model brings coherence back and unblocks cross-team work.
Migrating to cloud-native architecture
You're moving off legacy infrastructure to Kubernetes, serverless, or managed cloud services, and the migration needs to be sequenced carefully to avoid downtime, data loss, or a rewrite-from-scratch disaster. The right architecture plan makes the difference between a smooth transition and a months-long fire drill.
Tech debt is slowing delivery
Features that should take a week take a month. Every new piece of functionality requires navigating layers of accidental complexity baked in over years. A structured architecture review identifies the highest-leverage places to invest in improvement, without a full rewrite.
Building a new system from scratch
Greenfield projects carry their own risks: over-engineering, premature abstraction, and choosing patterns that won't survive scale. Early architecture consulting establishes the right foundations: appropriate boundaries, clear data flows, and an evolutionary design that grows with the product.
Architecture Services
Depending on where your system is and where you need it to go, I offer a range of focused services, each grounded in practical execution, not abstract theory.
Architecture Review & Assessment
A structured evaluation of your current system, examining service boundaries, data flows, coupling, scalability constraints, and operational gaps. You get a clear, prioritised picture of what's working, what's at risk, and what to address first.
Microservices Design & Migration
Decomposing a monolith is not just a technical exercise. It requires careful domain modelling, sequencing, and organisational alignment. I design the target service boundaries, define the migration strategy, and guide your team through execution without disrupting delivery.
API Design & Strategy
REST, GraphQL, gRPC: the choice matters, and so does the design. I help teams establish consistent API conventions, versioning strategies, and governance models that make integrations predictable and your platform easy to build on top of.
Event-Driven Architecture
Async, event-driven systems unlock scalability and decoupling, but they introduce complexity in event ordering, consistency, and observability. I design event-driven architectures that deliver the benefits without the operational chaos.
Cloud-Native Architecture
Designing for the cloud means more than lifting and shifting existing patterns. I help teams architect for managed services, containers, and infrastructure-as-code to build systems that are cost-efficient, resilient, and operationally maintainable at scale.
Performance & Scalability Optimisation
Latency spikes, database bottlenecks, memory pressure: performance problems have architectural root causes. I trace the system through profiling data and architecture analysis to identify the structural changes that make the most difference.
My Approach
Architecture work that doesn't stick is expensive. Every engagement follows a structured four-phase process designed to produce decisions that are understood, validated, and executable by your team.
Understand
I begin by understanding your business context, not just the system diagram. What are you trying to achieve? What are the pressures: time to market, scale, reliability, team velocity? I review the existing architecture, talk to engineers, and read the codebase to build a grounded picture of where things actually stand, not just where the documentation says they do.
Design
Architecture decisions are trade-offs, not facts. I lay out the realistic options (with their implications for complexity, cost, team capability, and migration risk) and work with you to arrive at a design that fits your actual constraints. The output is always a coherent target architecture with clear rationale, not a list of buzzwords.
Validate
Good architecture is testable before it's built. I facilitate structured design reviews, challenge assumptions, stress-test failure scenarios, and where useful, prototype critical paths. The goal is to surface the hard questions before your engineers spend weeks on a design that doesn't hold up.
Guide
Architecture is only as valuable as its implementation. I stay involved through the build phase, reviewing pull requests, answering questions, and course-correcting when implementation drifts from design intent. I also invest in knowledge transfer so your team understands the "why" behind every decision and can evolve the architecture confidently over time.
Engagement Models
Architecture consulting doesn't follow a one-size-fits-all model. I work with you to structure an engagement that matches your current situation and goals.
Architecture Review
A focused, time-boxed engagement that delivers a comprehensive assessment of your current architecture and a prioritised roadmap of recommendations. Typically two to four weeks. Ideal if you want an objective expert view before a major investment or inflection point.
Best for: Companies preparing for scale, fundraising, or a major technical initiative
Embedded Architect
Ongoing part-time engagement where I work directly alongside your engineering team, attending technical discussions, reviewing designs, and driving architectural evolution over time. Most appropriate for companies actively building toward a target architecture.
Best for: Teams executing a migration, platform rebuild, or sustained scaling effort
Advisory
Regular architecture sessions to act as a senior technical sounding board for your CTO, tech lead, or engineering team. I review designs, challenge assumptions, and provide experienced guidance without full embedding. Light-touch but high-value.
Best for: Strong internal teams that need periodic senior architectural oversight
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about software architecture consulting engagements.
An architecture review is an internally-driven process focused on improving your system, identifying risks, bottlenecks, and the path to a better architecture. Technical due diligence is externally-driven, typically commissioned by an investor or acquirer to assess whether the technology is sound and the team is credible. Both involve deep system analysis, but the audience, outputs, and intent differ. I offer both, and they sometimes overlap: a rigorous architecture review often doubles as preparation for investor scrutiny.
It depends on the scope. A focused architecture review of a medium-complexity system typically takes two to four weeks to complete thoroughly. Embedded architect engagements run three to twelve months, depending on what you're building and how much guidance your team needs along the way. Advisory arrangements are open-ended by design. In the initial conversation, I'll give you a realistic estimate based on your system size, team capacity, and objectives.
Both, depending on what's most valuable. For architecture reviews, the deliverable is a structured document: findings, risks, and recommendations with clear prioritisation. For embedded engagements, I stay hands-on, reviewing code, writing proof-of-concept implementations, pairing with engineers on complex problems, and contributing to critical path work. I don't produce recommendations and disappear. The architecture only succeeds if the team understands it and can execute it.
Yes, and I'll be direct: microservices are often the wrong answer, especially for teams that aren't yet large enough to justify the operational overhead. The first thing I do is challenge whether decomposition is actually the right solution for your specific situation. If it is, I design the migration using the Strangler Fig pattern or domain-driven decomposition, extracting services incrementally rather than attempting a big-bang rewrite. The goal is always to maintain delivery velocity while the architecture evolves underneath.
I've worked across a wide range of backend and infrastructure stacks: Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and .NET on the backend; PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, and RabbitMQ for data and messaging; AWS, GCP, and Azure for cloud infrastructure; Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform for deployment and IaC. Architecture principles transfer across stacks, as the patterns that make systems maintainable and scalable are largely language-agnostic. That said, I'm transparent about areas where I'd bring in a specialist alongside me.
Architecture that looks elegant on a whiteboard and fails in production is worse than no architecture at all. Every design decision I make is grounded in what your team can actually build, operate, and maintain given your current size, skills, and runway. I ask hard questions about operational complexity, team bandwidth, and migration cost. And I maintain a strong prior toward the simplest solution that solves the actual problem. Distributed systems, event sourcing, and CQRS are powerful patterns that are also frequently misapplied. The measure of good architecture is whether it makes your team faster and your system more reliable, not whether it matches a reference diagram.
Related Services
Technical Due Diligence
Independent assessment of a company's technology, architecture, and engineering team, for investors, acquirers, and leadership making high-stakes decisions.
Fractional CTO
Ongoing executive-level technical leadership: setting technical direction, building engineering teams, and driving architectural strategy alongside your business goals.
Ready to Fix the Architecture?
Whether you need a structured assessment of your current system, a migration plan to break apart a monolith, or an experienced architect to guide your team through a critical build, let's talk about where your architecture is today and where it needs to go.