Senior capacity, inside the team

One named engineer who owns work from design input to release, on your board, in your repo, in your ceremonies. Mentoring through reviews and pairing is part of the job; design authority sits in the same seat when the team needs it.

Same job, two wrappers

Permanent hire and fractional B2B share the same day-to-day.

Permanent / employed senior IC

Join your payroll as a senior individual contributor, hands-on in the squad.

Fractional / B2B embedded

Same seat in the squad. Invoiced through Automica Labs when a supplier arrangement suits both sides. Part-time or full-time intensity as agreed.

Where this works well

Signals of a good match.

Good fit if you need

  • Full-stack coverage: design, dev, QA, and DevOps in one person.
  • Hands-on senior craft: architectural judgement through code, standards, and pairing.
  • Legacy modernisation: modernise a legacy codebase or rescue a project stalled by technical debt.
  • End-to-end ownership: own a feature from wireframe to production release.

Recent work, and software since 1998

Senior delivery across design, development, QA, and DevOps.

The last three and a half years were full-time in a commercial product engineering team: shipping and operating services in production. Day to day that meant PHP and Laravel APIs, Vue.js client surfaces, and TypeScript services. Named employers and outcomes are on the CV, available on request. One public build is Reply desk: a Laravel application with a HubSpot integration, an MCP server, and Pest tests run in CI, with the code on GitHub.

Before that I ran a limited company as a contractor and freelancer, working direct to clients and through agencies. I started in software in 1998. That span includes working with designers on user flows, writing and maintaining test suites, building deployment pipelines, and shipping the code in between. Not siloed into one discipline.

Bristol-based and hybrid-ready. I am a regular at local meetups, and have given three talks at PHP South West, most recently on AI coding agents.

Full stack, end to end

PHP, Vue, and TypeScript as primary tools. Python and React when the work needs them. I pick up the stack the team already runs.

Day to day that means Laravel or Symfony APIs, Vue and TypeScript clients, OpenAPI, and TDD with Pest, PHPUnit, Pytest, or Vitest. CI/CD and AWS when the team already runs them.

IP, confidentiality, and AI in the open

Structured for product teams who need speed with clear ownership of IP and process.

Your IP stays yours

  • Your terms: work under your contracts, NDAs, and confidentiality terms as standard.
  • Your deliverables: all code, designs, and deliverables belong to you.
  • Your infrastructure: development inside your repositories, pipelines, and access controls.

AI in the open, review-led

  • Guardrailed assistance: agent-assisted development within your repo, standards, and guardrails.
  • Human-led review: faster iteration on boilerplate, tests, and refactors; architecture and PR review stay human-led.
  • Transparent tooling: clear about what runs locally and what touches your code; work stays inside your environment.
  • Maintainable speed: speed gains that keep readability and operability intact.

Working model

Join the squad and deliver to a clear definition of done. Permanent means I stay. Fractional means we can continue or stop at an agreed boundary.

The day-to-day is the same either way: your ceremonies, your backlog, your definition of done.

Permanent / employed

  • Your ceremonies: planning, stand-ups, refinement, and retros in Agile, Scrum, or Kanban setups.
  • Backlog literacy: work from epics and stories with clear acceptance criteria and definition of done.
  • Feature ownership: own slices from design input through to production release, completed to agreed DoD.
  • Code review and mentoring: review PRs, unblock developers, and pair with junior and mid-level engineers.
  • Stay: knowledge, decisions, and runbooks remain in the squad because I am in the squad.

Fractional / B2B

  • Same seat: the same ceremonies, backlog, and DoD as an employed IC.
  • Invoiced through Automica Labs: named supplier, intensity as agreed.
  • Milestone boundaries: scoped goals and a clear definition of done; continue or stop at the boundary.
  • Handback: document decisions, patterns, and runbooks so the team owns what ships if the work does not continue.

Contact Mike Karthauser

Get in touch about joining the squad, or ask for the CV.

Commission a project

A bounded, named outcome when you do not need someone in the squad.

Introductory call

A 30-minute Teams video call, once. Discuss your sticking points and we can decide on your next feature.

Audit in a day

A written note on the site or stack you already have. You can take the note and stop.

One feature

A feature with a clear done, on your accounts, then handover. You can take it and stop.

Architecture-first MVP

A first build of your product with tests, a pipeline, and handover, on your accounts.

Already have a brief? Send it.

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