Senior engineering expertise — on demand. Over a decade building systems that scale, leading technical teams through complexity, and delivering outcomes that hold long after the engagement ends.
The Factory Floor
GRITBefore a single line of code was ever written, there was a factory floor. Growing up blue-collar — shifts in an automotive supplier plant, hands-on with physical systems, accountable to deadlines that could not slip — instilled something that no bootcamp or university program teaches: the grit to take anything across the finish line at full velocity, regardless of what stands between start and done.
That upbringing is not incidental to the work. It is the engine of it. Where timelines compress, the response is to accelerate.
When others back off the second the pressure lifts, my reflex is to push harder.
The Attack Map
BOLDNESSThe first real software commission was not a CRUD app or a landing page. It was an IT attack map for an employer — a live visualisation plotting the geo-location of every cyber threat actively attempting to breach their on-premise network.
Watching thousands of attack vectors converge in real time — from Russia, China, Eastern Europe, South America — made one thing immediately clear: building something impactful means operating in an environment where forces are actively working against you. That understanding never left.
It shaped an engineering philosophy built around resilience, visibility, and the assumption that systems will be tested — not just by load, but by adversity.
The Architecture Evolution
VELOCITYModern software development is a story of evolving needs. What starts as a well-structured monolith — sensible, fast to ship, easy to reason about — eventually meets the wall that every growing platform meets: the point where architectural decisions made at one thousand users become liabilities at ten thousand.
The answer is rarely to rebuild from scratch. It is to decompose with precision — understanding domain boundaries, data ownership, and service contracts before a single line of infrastructure code is written. Architecture is a product of thinking, not tooling.
The proof. A B2B SaaS platform launched on a modular monolith that did exactly what it was supposed to — encapsulating business logic cleanly, shipping fast, and onboarding thousands of companies without friction. It was not a stepping stone. It was the right tool for that stage.
When the business found its stride, the deliberate migration to microservices unlocked what the monolith could not: independent scaling, domain isolation, and a new level of automation across the platform. Decomposed by domain, unified through GraphQL Federation, deployed without disruption — and the business expanded 5× on the back of it.
The Founding Engineer
INNOVATION0 → 1
Built from scratch as 1 of 2 founding engineers
Full
Stack ownership
Live
In production
Front-End
Back-End & Infra
AI Tooling
The culmination of that journey was a founding engineer role — the opportunity to build an entire company from the ground up. A vehicle logistics marketplace, connecting shippers and carriers in a sector that had not yet been disrupted the way it deserved.
Every expectation set was exceeded. Not occasionally — consistently. Product shipped before anyone thought it would. Systems scaled beyond what the projections assumed. The platform went live, found traction, and proved what happens when engineering is treated as a competitive differentiator rather than a cost centre.
That experience — co-owning the full technical surface area of a live business alongside a fellow founding engineer, with no safety net and nowhere to hide — is what separates Marhardt from consultants who have only ever worked inside someone else's system.
Grit. Boldness. Velocity. Innovation. Those four words are not a marketing exercise — they are the account of a decade of building things that mattered in environments that did not forgive weakness. They are what forged the factory worker into an architect, the junior developer into a founding engineer, the technologist into a trusted senior partner for teams that needed someone who had actually been in the fire.
When you work with Marhardt, you are not hiring a consultant. You are bringing that entire journey into your solution.
TypeScript, React, Node.js, and the full modern stack — production-grade systems built from first principles. No boilerplate scaffolding, no opinionated frameworks forced where they do not belong. Code that works now and can be reasoned about later.
AWS, GCP, and Azure — designed for resilience, observability, and genuine cost efficiency. Infrastructure-as-code from day one. Systems that fail gracefully, scale predictably, and do not generate a surprise bill on the first Monday of the month.
APIs, data pipelines, event streams, third-party platforms, and legacy systems that were never meant to talk to each other. Complex integration work done with enough care that it actually holds — not just on demo day.
Staff-level IC work, architecture reviews, engineering organisation design, and hands-on team mentorship. The strategic thinking of a senior hire — without the twelve-month onboarding period or the full-time overhead that comes with it.
CI/CD pipelines, containerisation, observability stacks, and the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else fast. Deployments that are boring — because boring deployments mean engineers spend their time on product, not firefighting.
Technical product strategy, roadmap alignment, build-vs-buy analysis, and the kind of engineering judgment that prevents six months of work from solving the wrong problem. Where hard technical thinking and product clarity meet.
years of senior engineering practice
projects delivered across industries
technology stacks in active production
on-time delivery commitment
Engagements are selective by design. A limited number of projects run concurrently — because full attention is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire point. Every client receives real ownership, direct communication, and outcomes worth talking about.
If the timeline is real and the problem is hard, that is exactly the conversation worth having. Start with a brief description of where things stand and what you need to change.
Areas of interest