SalesRook
Senior Technical Lead
Lead generation and qualification platform for letting agents. Handles enquiries on autopilot.
Service
Full-Stack Engineering
The unglamorous product surface AI features have to live inside.
An AI feature is 10% model and 90% product: auth, billing, queues, dashboards, and the migration that has to run without downtime. Ten years of building that layer — most recently as technical lead on a SaaS platform serving the UK property market.
Sound familiar?
You probably need this if…
If two or more of these land, this is the right conversation to have.
The model works; the product around it doesn't exist yet.
Your team is strong on ML and thin on production web engineering.
Background jobs fail silently and nobody notices until a customer does.
Every deploy is a manual ceremony only one person knows how to perform.
Deliverables
What actually gets built.
Artifacts, not slides — all of it yours to keep and run without me.
- 01
Features shipped end to end
Schema, API, UI, tests, and deploy — one person accountable from ticket to production, with no handoff gaps to fall through.
- 02
The boring critical layer
Authentication, roles and permissions, billing, background queues, admin dashboards, audit trails. The things nobody demos and every customer depends on.
- 03
Performance and cost work
Query plans, N+1s, caching, bundle size, and cloud spend — measured before and after, not asserted.
- 04
CI/CD and observability
Pipelines, preview environments, structured logging, error tracking, and alerts that fire before a customer emails you.
- 05
A team that can keep going
Code review, documentation, and pairing, so the codebase doesn't quietly become dependent on me being around.
Process
How this one runs.
Three phases, with something demoable at the end of every week.
- 01
Land in the codebase
Ship something small and real in the first week — a bug fix or a thin feature — to learn the system and prove the pipeline works end to end.
- 02
Deliver in weekly slices
Vertical slices, demoable every week. You always know what's done and what's next without asking.
- 03
Leave it maintainable
Docs, tests, and a handover session so your team owns everything I touched.
The stack
What I reach for.
Defaults, not dogma — I'll work in yours where it makes more sense.
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- NestJS
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- GraphQL
- AWS
- GitHub Actions
Proof
Where this has shipped.
Real products, in production, with real users on them.
FAQ
Before you ask.
Do you work with existing codebases?
Mostly, yes. Greenfield is rarer than a five-year-old codebase with a deadline attached, and the second one is the more useful skill.
Which stack do you default to?
Next.js and TypeScript on the front, Node or Python on the back, Postgres underneath. I'll happily work in yours instead — the patterns transfer.
Can you lead a team rather than only write code?
That's my day job. I'm Senior Technical Lead on a team of five, so code review, architecture, and sprint planning come with it.
Do you do product design too?
When it's needed. On one portfolio project I designed the product and wrote the site's content as well as building it.
Related
Often paired with.
Need help with Full-Stack Engineering?
Tell me what you're working on. I'll tell you what it takes — and whether it's worth building at all.