What are you dealing with?

• Your team needs a lead, but not a full-time hire yet.

  Contract tech lead

  I 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 SEO

  Move 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 performance

  Find 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 delivery

  Faster local setup, CI/CD your team trusts, end-to-end tests that catch regressions, and code standards that enforce themselves.

Case studies

• InYourPocket

  Moving a 100+ city travel guide from Symfony to Next.js without losing search traffic

  I led the redesign and migration of an SEO-heavy European city guide (around 100,000 URLs, 8M monthly search impressions) from Symfony to Next.js and NestJS, step by step behind redirects. Search rankings improved after launch.

• A top global sportswear brand · via Inova IT

  Product drops that held at peak

  I worked on the microservices behind limited-edition product drops for a top global sportswear brand: up to 2.45M requests per second and 50 Gbps at peak, expanded to 14+ markets.

All work

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.

Writing

All Posts

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.