Technical Lead on Contract
Architecture, standards and review for a project pulling apart.
You have developers but no technical lead, or one project has gone out of control. I take ownership of architecture, standards, review and integration, pull the technical debt down while the product keeps shipping, and hand the role back to someone on your side.
Starting point
A fixed-fee repository audit of about a week, delivered as a written report with priorities. Worth having even if nothing follows — your own team can execute it.
Who it is for
- Product owners with a team but no technical lead
- CTOs with one project that has escaped control
- Studios where a project is drowning in technical debt
- Clients accepting delivery from a contractor and unsure what they are being handed
You need this when
- The team keeps writing, but throughput falls and defects rise
- Every developer does it their own way and the codebase is delaminating
- Nobody dares merge, and branches live for months
- The one person who understood the system has left
- You need an independent read on what a contractor actually delivered
- The project needs rescuing, not rewriting
What is included, end to end
- Audit of the repository, its history, architecture, process and bottlenecks — written up with priorities
- A strategy decision: incremental recovery or rewrite, argued rather than asserted
- Architectural boundaries: what lives where, which layers exist, what gets reused
- A technical-debt register, prioritised, each item costed in schedule terms
- Code standards written for the actual stack of the project
- Automated enforcement in hooks and CI, so the rules hold without anyone policing them
- Commit and branching conventions, and a merge protocol
- Code review of the team's work, with explanation rather than rejection
- The integrator role: branches merged into a working trunk, conflicts resolved, broken builds restored
- Technical debt retired in stages, alongside product development
- Handover of the role to a staff lead — the goal, not a side effect
What you get
- An audit report with priorities and schedule costs
- Standards embedded in the process so they keep working after I leave
- A technical-debt register you can plan against
- A project that builds, merges and behaves predictably
- A team that holds the bar on its own
Evidence
Work actually shipped. Client names and domain details are under NDA; the engineering is described without them.
Started the project, then returned as technical lead: 43.9% of 1,124 commits and 44.3% of surviving lines in a ten-person monorepo, with 86–100% of the native layer.
41% of every merge commit in the repository — the de facto integrator. The next most active did a quarter of that.
242 files written by other developers subsequently corrected across 123 commits: normalising modules, reverting unfinished features, restoring broken builds after other people's merges, clearing MISRA violations, and catching domain errors — including a reference catalogue with zero asset overlap with the project.
Standards automated rather than merely documented: a 665-line style gate on a pre-commit hook, deliberately checking only added lines so work on older code is never blocked, plus blame-ignore revisions so bulk reformatting does not destroy attribution.
The convention actually held: 92.5% of my commits conform to the agreed format, against 32–73% across the rest of the team.
The project's entire normative base is mine: eleven development and quality standards, mandatory rules for C99, a technical-debt register, merge protocols, and per-person working cards for ten contributors.
Refactoring without stopping the product: a god component delaminated by strangler fig, and a dead engine tree removed in stages rather than in one rewrite.
How it works commercially
The one line priced by time rather than by project: a fixed fee for the audit, a monthly retainer with agreed load while the recovery runs, then a declining load as the role transfers to your side.
Not included
- Hiring, firing and line management
- Ownership of product decisions and business deadlines