hello@krischase.com

[02] Engagements · Austin, TX · Remote US

Engineering leadership consulting

For engineering orgs between roughly 10 and 100+ people that have outgrown how they are run. Org design and ownership, hiring and the leadership bench, delivery cadence, reliability, and the few metrics an executive team can act on. I led 100+ engineers across web, mobile, QA, IT and DevOps as VP of Software Engineering at Talent Systems and grew PublicSq. from 4 to 24 engineers in under a year.

Book a 20-min introHow I operate
Engineers led
100+
VP of Software Engineering, Talent Systems
Team growth
4 to 24
PublicSq., under 12 months
Sprint velocity
2x
Delivery and quality discipline
Production incidents
80 to 90%↓
Release, flags and observability

What I help with

Mechanisms over heroics

Heroics get a team to its first few dozen engineers. Mechanisms are what keep it shipping past that. These are the ones I install.

Org design and ownership

Cross-functional pods with functional guilds, a crisp answer to who owns every system and decision, and a structure that still makes sense at twice the size.

Hiring and leadership bench

Hiring plans sequenced so leads arrive before the work does, structured loops with a high bar, and coaching for the managers and directors who will run the org day to day.

Delivery cadence

Quarterly objectives, a weekly operating rhythm, visible plans with owners and checkpoints, and release practice with feature flags and CI/CD so deploying and launching are separate decisions.

Reliability and on-call

SLOs that mean something, observability that shows a bad change in minutes, blameless postmortems and an on-call rotation that engineers can live with.

Vendors to in-house, and integrations

Moving delivery from outsourced vendors to in-house teams one product line at a time, and integrating acquired teams and platforms without losing the people who built them.

Executive metrics

Delivery cost per feature, cycle time, reliability against SLOs and spend, built with the data team and kept to the handful of numbers that change a decision.

How it runs

Diagnose, plan, operate, hand off

  1. [01]

    Diagnose

    People, product, reliability and spend. Interviews with leads and engineers, a read of the delivery data, and a look at the code. Two weeks.

  2. [02]

    Plan

    A 90-day plan with owners, checkpoints and the metrics we will move, written down and agreed with the founder or executive sponsor.

  3. [03]

    Operate and hand off

    A weekly rhythm with the leadership team until the mechanisms run without me. Coaching for the people who will own them.

Who it is for

Four situations I see most

Founder-led engineering past 10 people

The founder is still running engineering by hand and it has stopped working. Structure, a first layer of leads and an operating rhythm, with an honest answer about whether you need a fractional CTO instead.

A new VP or director of engineering

A first-time executive who inherited a large org. A peer who has done the job, a plan for the first 90 days, and coaching through the first hard calls.

Delivery has stalled

Releases slip, incidents pile up, and the roadmap is not believable. Release discipline, ownership and metrics usually fix more of this than headcount does.

Growth or acquisition changed the shape

A team that doubled, a vendor transition, or an acquired platform that needs to become part of the org. Sequencing, decision rights and clear communication so people stay.

Background

Where this comes from

I wrote up the 60 to 100+ period at Talent Systems in Scaling an engineering org from 60 to 100+. The full history is on the resume, and people I have led describe the experience on the testimonials page.

FAQ

How I lead

More on the FAQ page and on how I operate.

How do you scale teams and what structures do you use?

Cross-functional pods with functional guilds, crisp RACI, and KPIs and SLAs. Mechanisms over heroics. Raise the baseline through cadence and clarity.

What is the largest org you have led?

100+ engineers across web, mobile, QA, IT and DevOps as VP of Software Engineering at Talent Systems, spanning 8 product lines with teams in North America, Europe, South America and APAC. Global and remote-first.

What is your bar for hiring?

Top-notch or keep looking. Structured loops, work samples, and trial projects when useful. Hire for ownership, collaboration, and a bias to ship.

How do you drive predictable delivery?

Quarterly objectives, fortnightly demos, visible risk registers, burn-up charts, and explicit tradeoffs on scope, time and quality.

What do your first 90 days look like?

Diagnose (people, product, reliability, spend), align on outcomes, design a minimal plan with owners and checkpoints, then deliver in short loops with visible metrics.

What metrics do you care about?

Revenue and margin, reliability (SLOs and MTTR), delivery cost per feature, and learning velocity. Keep a small set tied to real decisions and review cadences.

Next move

Has the org outgrown how it is run?

Tell me the size of the team, what is breaking and what you want to be true in 90 days. You get a short written proposal with scope, cadence and pricing.

Get in touchBook a call

See also: fractional CTO, CTO consulting, AI engineering leadership, resume, and contact.