Contract tech lead for startups whose backend is slowing them down.
I'm Mario Kranjec, a senior backend engineer. I help startups and scale-ups ship backends that hold up by leading teams, moving off legacy stacks, and getting releases out every week instead of every quarter.
Book a call30 minutes, free. No pitch deck.
- 10+
- years building production systems
- 2.45M
- requests per second at peak, for a top global sportswear brand
- 7
- engineers led as team lead
What are you dealing with?
- Your team needs a lead, but not a full-time hire yet.Contract tech leadI join 2–3 days a week to run planning, set architecture and code standards, and mentor the team, until you hire a lead or no longer need one.
- The old stack is slowing you down, but your traffic depends on it.Legacy migrations without losing SEOMove from a legacy PHP stack or monolith to a modern one step by step, behind redirects and monitoring: no big-bang rewrite, no ranking crash.
- Peak traffic is coming, and you're not sure the backend will hold.Scale and performanceFind the bottlenecks before your users do: service-to-service communication, caching, databases and load testing for launch-day traffic.
- Shipping is slow, and it's not because people aren't working hard.Developer experience and deliveryFaster local setup, CI/CD your team trusts, end-to-end tests that catch regressions, and code standards that enforce themselves.
Case studies
- 100kURLs migrated, 8M monthly search impressions
Moving a 100+ city travel guide from Symfony to Next.js without losing search traffic
- 2.45Mrequests per second at peak · 50 Gbps · 14+ markets
Product drops that held at peak
How we can work together
- Fractional
- 2–3 days a week, ongoing, as part of your team: in your standups, your repo and your planning.
- Fixed-scope project
- One defined outcome, such as a migration, a performance push or a delivery setup, with scope and timeline agreed upfront.
Remote-first, working in EU time zones (CET). On-site visits by arrangement.
Hi, I’m Mario. I’ve spent more than ten years building production systems, from advertising-screen networks in the UAE to platforms that have to hold up on launch day. I work hands-on: in your repo, your standups and your planning, until the team can carry on without me.
Most recently I stepped in as temporary acting team lead for seven engineers at CargoX. Outside client work I co-organise Spletne urice Maribor, Slovenia’s oldest still-active tech meetup.
Not sure which of these fits?
That's what the intro call is for. Tell me what's going on, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person to help.