Services

Fractional Principal Engineer

James Phillips has over 25 years of experience working at companies like SpaceX, Netflix, Google, HashiCorp, and Sequoia Capital. He can quickly form a mental model of your complex software system and reason about solutions to problems, improvements, and innovations from first principles.

Areas of experience include:

• Software architecture and design
• Deleting things at all levels of the stack, and sometimes entire stacks and projects
• Critical code reviews
• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps
• Data engineering and data infrastructure
• High-performance real-time embedded systems
• Distributed systems (massive scale and high performance real-time)
• Building and managing software teams, and teams of agents

Services are sold as fixed-size slots. Here’s how each slot works:

• 8 hours sync per month: in-person (James will travel) or video, divided how you choose (architecture reviews, technical planning, pair programming)
• 8 hours async per month: via Slack (code reviews, design feedback, general guidance), usually respond within 24 hours
• Travel to anywhere in Los Angeles is included or will bill separately for travel expenses outside of Los Angeles
• Month-to-month terms with no minimum number of months, 30 days notice to cancel
• 2-4 weeks of time off throughout the year with advance notice
• $8,000 per month rate

This is best for technical teams facing architecture, scaling, or infrastructure decisions beyond their current experience. Hiring a full-time principal engineer is difficult and can cost $325k+ annually with a long-term commitment. Engaging with James as a fractional principal engineer is a relatively low cost and low friction way to get access to this expertise right when you need it - even a one month engagement is fine!

If you’d like to find out more, please contact james@modulecollective.com.