Austin, Texas · Travis

Your lead engineer, embedded in your Austin team

Architecture · Strategy · Daily code

You don't need a CTO who won't touch the keyboard. You don't need another freelancer who disappears mid-sprint. You need one senior engineer who owns your entire technical stack — someone who makes executive-level calls AND ships code every single day. I bring 27 years of startup engineering to Austin founders across Travis and all of Texas. Remote-first, on-site when it actually changes the outcome.

This is what it actually looks like

When your team doesn't have a technical partner.

You're on your third freelancer this year. The first one disappeared mid-sprint. The second one built something that technically works but nobody can maintain. Now you're onboarding someone new again, explaining the same business logic for the third time, watching them nod along while you wonder if they actually get it.

You're in a meeting and someone asks "can we add this feature by Q2?" and you have no idea. You can't evaluate timelines, you can't assess tradeoffs, and the person you're paying to know these things gives you a different answer every time.

Your app goes down on a Saturday night. You text your developer. No response for 6 hours. When they finally reply, they need another 4 hours to figure out what broke because they don't remember how the system fits together. You're sitting at dinner calculating revenue lost per minute.

The real problem isn't that you need a developer. And it's not that you need a CTO. It's that the role you actually need doesn't fit standard job descriptions — you need someone who thinks at the executive level but executes at the individual contributor level, every single day.

What an Embedded Lead Engineer Actually Does

Half the "fractional CTOs" out there are advisors in a fancy hat — Notion docs, Slack opinions, zero pull requests. That isn't the job.

Writes real code

Not a strategy doc, not a Notion page — production code, in your repo, tested and deployed. The lead engineer you hire should be able to unblock the team by shipping, not just advising on Slack.

Owns architecture decisions

Database choice, auth pattern, deployment pipeline, monitoring, cost structure. Founders without a technical partner end up with whatever their first contractor felt like using — and pay for it later.

Manages the humans

Reviews contractor output, interviews engineering hires, calls the BS when a vendor is overcharging, and makes sure everyone on your team is set up to succeed.

Carries investor credibility

When a VC asks "who's your technical lead?" on a fundraising call, you need a name, a LinkedIn, and a track record — not a contractor nobody knows. An embedded lead engineer closes that gap without the full-time equity grant.

The "embedded" part means I work across 3 clients at a time — so Austin founders get senior engineering judgment at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. The "still writes the code" part is what separates this from advisory roles.

Seth Black — embedded lead engineer for startups

About Seth

27 years. 20+ startups. Every mistake your next hire is about to make.

I started writing code at 15. Since then I've been engineer #1, CTO, lead architect, and the technical backbone of startup after startup — watching brilliant ideas die from bad engineering and great engineering die from bad business. I've seen every way it goes wrong.

I've hand-rolled neural networks in C when there were no good Python libraries, shoved terabytes of data through Postgres every hour without melting the cluster, designed custom BLE protocols for wearable hardware, built CAD-integrated configurators that drove real CNC machines, shipped computer vision systems that ran on off-the-shelf cameras, and stood up billing/auth/ops infrastructure more times than I can count.

Now I embed in small teams as the lead engineer. I own the architecture, the strategy, and the code itself. Not as a consultant who advises and leaves — as a partner who shows up every day and builds.

Health & Biotech

ML / AI Systems

Hardware / Embedded

Energy & Climate

Fintech / Payments

Manufacturing / CAD

Computer Vision

Consumer / SaaS

How The Full-Stack Partnership Works

No discovery calls that turn into sales pitches. No 30-slide decks. Here's what happens when a Austin founder reaches out:

Embed

I join your team. Read every line of code. Understand the business, the product, the people.

Assess

Identify what's working, what needs attention, what's urgent. Give you a straight answer about where things stand.

Own

Take full ownership of the technical stack. Architecture, infrastructure, daily development. It's mine now.

Build

Ship features. Solve problems. Make executive calls AND write production code — every single day.

Evolve

Grow the technical foundation as your business grows. The code is yours from day one — no lock-in, ever.

The Full-Stack Partnership

One engineer. Your entire technical stack. Architecture, strategy, and daily code — available to Austin founders and teams.

Embedded Lead Engineer

Architecture, strategy, and daily code — one person, fully embedded

I join your team as the lead engineer. I own the technical vision, make the architectural calls, and write production code every single day. No management layers, no handoffs, no disappearing acts.

Full-stack development — Python, databases, DevOps, mobile, web. The whole thing.
Executive-level technical strategy — architecture decisions, build-vs-buy, scaling plans.
Architecture reviews, hiring guidance, and the technical credibility investors demand.
100% code ownership from day one.

Roster: I only take on 3 clients at a time. When the 3 seats are full, the door is closed until one opens.

$15,000/mo 3-month minimum · 6-month maximum · 3-client roster

Ask About a Seat

Lessons from 20+ Startups

Twenty startups. Every flavor of failure and quiet success. Here are a few lessons I bring to every Austin engagement:

The "Genius Dev" leaves eventually

Worked at a crowdfunding startup where the one rock-star engineer used the attention to land a FAANG job — and left a gaping hole nobody could fill. The lesson: document relentlessly, and never let one person become a single point of failure.

Watch churn more than bookings

Had a sales rep "crush" their goals by selling features the company didn't actually have. Customers churned right after commission got paid. The lesson: retention and engagement metrics tell the truth; booking numbers often don't.

"Quick fixes" on Friday are rarely quick

Shipped a "small" change on a Friday afternoon that took down an e-commerce site for launch weekend, because I tested in Firefox and forgot about IE. The lesson: test like a user, not like a developer.

Interview for judgment, not trivia

Hired a developer who aced every technical quiz, then turned out not to know how to code — they'd been hoping to figure it out before anyone noticed. The lesson: conversational interviews about real past decisions beat whiteboard gotchas every time.

These aren't hypotheticals. Each one cost a real company real money — so your Austin startup doesn't have to re-learn them.

Austin, Texas · Travis · Major Metro

Working with Austin Founders

Austin — 'Silicon Hills' — has the most active startup ecosystem in Texas, and it's the one I'm most plugged into outside of Houston. Capital Factory, SXSW, the ex-FAANG migration, the wave of post-2020 California refugees — all of it has produced an unusually dense founder population. SaaS, AI, fintech, consumer apps. The talent market is brutal, salaries are higher than the rest of Texas, and the bar for what 'shipping' looks like is closer to San Francisco than to Dallas.

What I see most often in Austin: founders who built v1 in a weekend with Cursor or v0 or Claude Code, raised a small angel round on the demo, and now have a paying customer noticing the app falls over when more than four people log in at once. The version of the engineer they actually need at this stage isn't a senior IC. It's someone who's seen a hundred of these hangovers and knows which ten things to fix first — and which fifty things to leave alone until you know whether the product is going to live.

I'm in Houston, drive to Austin regularly for kickoffs, architecture days, and the occasional in-person crunch. The Domain, downtown, Capital Factory's North Austin space — that's where the meetings happen. Day-to-day work is remote. Austin runs on Slack and the assumption that 'remote-first' is the default, which is fine by me — that's how I work anyway.

<built-in method copy of dict object at 0x7f649956eec0>

The companies I take on in Austin tend to cluster around SaaS, AI, fintech, consumer — though I've delivered engagements across nearly every flavor of Texas startup. What they have in common: a founder who needs someone they can trust to make technical calls without having to double-check every decision.

Distance from Houston

147 miles · regional

Market tier

Major Metro · pop. 1,940,039

Region

Travis, Texas

Also Serving Travis

Remote-first engagements work across all of Texas. Some of the other Travis cities I work with:

Pflugerville Lakeway Steiner Ranch Manor Wells Branch All Texas Cities →

The Austin Industry Landscape

Where the actual work in Austin happens — and where founders most often need a senior technical partner who already speaks the domain.

SaaS & B2B Software

Austin's dominant flavor. Indeed alumni, Atlassian Austin, the steady pipeline of FAANG ex-pats. Most B2B founders I work with here have shipped a v1, hit some early traction, and are now staring down the engineering quality cliff that separates a demo from a product.

Indeed Atlassian Austin Cloudflare Austin GitHub Austin

AI & ML Startups

Austin's AI scene has exploded since 2023. A meaningful slice are doing real domain-specific work; many are wrappers. The honest filter: do you have proprietary data or proprietary distribution? If neither, fair questions about your moat will come up in the first investor conversation, and the engineering decisions you make now should account for that.

AMD AI Tesla Austin Apple AI Austin Stability AI alumni network

Consumer Apps

Austin has a strong consumer-tech tradition (Bumble, RetailMeNot, HomeAway alumni networks), and the city's lifestyle attracts the kind of founders who want to build something everyday people use, not enterprise software. Ops complexity is usually higher than founders expect — billing, push notifications, mobile release cycles.

Bumble HomeAway alumni RetailMeNot alumni

Fintech

Brex/Ramp influences plus the steady flow of fintech founders out of Indeed and consumer apps. Compliance is a real concern, but Austin's fintech founders are usually savvier about it than founders elsewhere — the question is whether they've architected for the compliance they actually need vs. the compliance their last investor told them about.

Q2 Holdings Kasasa Lithic alumni network

Anchor Organizations

Capital Factory
Austin Tech Council
Tesla Gigafactory Austin
Apple Austin Campus
Indeed HQ
Oracle Austin

Universities & Research

University of Texas at Austin
St. Edward's University
Texas State University (San Marcos)

Incubators & Funds

Capital Factory
Sputnik ATX
ATX Venture Partners
S3 Ventures
Long Journey Ventures
Active Capital
Plug and Play Austin

Neighborhoods I Serve

Downtown / 2nd Street East Austin / Mueller South Congress (SoCo) South Lamar (SoLa) The Domain (North Austin) Round Rock Cedar Park

From the field

What I see most often in Austin

The Austin engagement that comes up most: a founder shipped v1 in a weekend using AI tools, got their first dozen paying customers, and now everything that wasn't a problem at three users is a problem at three hundred. Auth is hardcoded. The database is a single Postgres instance with no replicas, no backups beyond what the hosting provider does, and no migrations system. There's a 'monitoring' system that consists of someone watching logs in a tab. The founder has raised — or is about to raise — and the new investors are asking technical-DD questions the team can't answer. Coming in mid-fire is most of what Austin engagements look like. The work is rarely glamorous: rip out hardcoded credentials, set up real CI, write the four tests that catch the actual bugs in production, build a deployment pipeline that won't take down the site every time someone pushes. Boring, in other words. The kind of boring you can charge for because the company would otherwise die from its own demo.

Questions I Actually Get Asked

Are you in the Austin tech scene?

More than I am in Houston's, ironically. I drive up regularly, work out of Capital Factory or client offices when I'm in town, and have ongoing relationships with founders across the Austin ecosystem. I'm not on the demo-day circuit, but if you've been at Capital Factory for an architecture conversation in the last two years, there's a reasonable chance we've crossed paths.

Do you work with AI-first or vibe-coded startups?

Yes — this is one of the most common patterns I see in Austin. The challenge usually isn't the AI part. It's everything around it: auth, billing, monitoring, deployment, the boring infrastructure that makes the AI feature usable in production. I'm comfortable with the LLM stack itself, but the value I bring to most AI-first teams is the boring engineering they didn't think to build.

Can you do on-site at Capital Factory or The Domain?

Yes. Houston-to-Austin is a three-hour drive I make regularly. Same-day or next-day on-site is normal for Austin clients, especially during kickoffs or architecture-review days.

What if you leave?

With freelancers you're already dependent on someone with zero commitment to your business. I embed specifically to stay. The 3-month minimum exists so we both take the partnership seriously. And everything I build is yours from day one — code, documentation, all of it.

Can one person really handle our entire technical stack?

I've done exactly this for 20+ startups over 27 years. I know what one senior engineer can handle — and I know when to say "we need help here." One person who owns everything actually moves faster than a team of specialists coordinating through Jira tickets.

Do you work with Austin-based teams in person?

I'm primarily remote-first, which means I can usually start faster. For Austin and other Texas clients, on-site visits are possible when they genuinely move the needle — not for meetings that could've been a Slack message.

What happens if we're not a good fit?

The 3-month minimum exists so we both take the engagement seriously and have real time to ship. After that, we can wrap at the end of any month up to the 6-month maximum. You keep all the code and documentation.

How much does this cost?

$15,000/month. 3-month minimum, 6-month maximum. No hourly billing, no tiered packages, no upsells. I only take on 3 clients at a time — if you want a seat, let's talk and we'll see if the fit is right.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Absolutely, yes. Your legacy code is haunted by the disembodied spirits of junior developers who copy-pasted from Stack Overflow without understanding what they were doing. Let's clear them out.

Let's Talk About Your Team

One meeting. No pitch deck, no proposals. Just a conversation about what you need and whether I'm the right fit.

Roster limited to 3 clients

Book a 20-Minute Call

Pick a time that works. No sales pitch — just a straight conversation about your team and your stack.

Book a Call

No commitment. 20 minutes. Straight answers.

or send a message if you prefer async

Name

The Full-Stack Partnership — $15,000/month

3-month minimum, 6-month maximum. Roster limited to 3 clients.

Tell me about your team and what you're building

No long-term contracts. You own all the code.