Houston, Texas · Harris

Your lead engineer, embedded in your Houston 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 Houston founders across Harris 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 Houston 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 Houston 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 Houston 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 Houston 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 Houston startup doesn't have to re-learn them.

Houston, Texas · Harris · Major Metro

Working with Houston Founders

Houston has a startup scene, but it's smaller than the headlines suggest. The real action here isn't a SaaS-incubator hype machine — it's existing industry. Energy operators trying to digitize fifty-year-old workflows. Real estate firms drowning in spreadsheet pipelines. Hospital systems modernizing patient platforms one acquired vendor at a time. That's the founder population I actually work with in Houston.

What I see most often: a Houston founder gets dismissed by East Coast and West Coast tech as 'industry, not tech.' So they hire offshore at a quarter the price, end up with a tangled codebase nobody can debug, then hire local at twice the price and end up with a Postgres instance running on someone's spare Linux box. By the time they reach me, the build is six months behind, two contractors deep, and held together by environment variables nobody documented.

I'm based in The Woodlands and work with Houston clients remote-first, with on-site days when they actually change the outcome — the kickoff, the architecture review, the day someone needs to sit in a room and reconstruct a payment flow on a whiteboard. I'm not the meetup-circuit kind of programmer; you won't see me at every Capital Factory event. The work happens in the codebase.

<built-in method copy of dict object at 0x7f649956f740>

The companies I take on in Houston tend to cluster around energy, real estate, medical, climate — 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

2 miles · short drive

Market tier

Major Metro · pop. 6,227,666

Region

Harris, Texas

Also Serving Harris

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

Pasadena Atascocita Baytown Spring Channelview All Texas Cities →

The Houston Industry Landscape

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

Energy & Oil-and-Gas Tech

Pipeline integrity, well-data ingestion, downhole sensor analytics, ESG reporting, refinery scheduling. Founders here are usually solving a problem that already exists at scale and needs digital infrastructure built around it — not inventing a new category from scratch.

Halliburton BP America ConocoPhillips ExxonMobil Greentown Labs Houston

Real Estate & PropTech

Houston's real estate market is one of the largest in the country and one of the least automated. Property management, lease analytics, tenant communication, transaction tooling — the gap between what's possible and what's deployed is wider here than almost any other major US metro.

Camden Property Trust Hines Howard Hughes Corporation

Healthcare & Medical

TMC is the world's largest medical complex. Most founders in this space are integrating with hospital systems that run software older than they are. HIPAA compliance is mandatory, not optional, and the data flows are unforgiving — but the customer base is enormous and the existing tools are mediocre.

Texas Medical Center MD Anderson Memorial Hermann Houston Methodist Baylor College of Medicine

Industrial, Logistics & Port

Port of Houston is the largest US crude oil export port and a major container hub. Logistics-tech founders here typically come from inside the industry and need a technical partner who can translate domain expertise into software that actually ships.

Port of Houston BNSF Union Pacific

Anchor Organizations

Texas Medical Center
NASA Johnson Space Center
Port of Houston
The Ion
Greentown Labs Houston
TMC Innovation

Universities & Research

Rice University
University of Houston
Baylor College of Medicine
UTHealth
Texas A&M (Houston)

Incubators & Funds

The Ion
Greentown Labs Houston
Mercury Fund
Rice Alliance
Houston Exponential

Neighborhoods I Serve

The Woodlands (home base) Memorial Energy Corridor Galleria / Uptown Sugar Land Pearland Katy Midtown / EaDo The Heights

From the field

What I see most often in Houston

The Houston engagement that comes up most is a founder solving an industrial problem with the wrong technology — usually because they got pitched on it. A recent example: an energy operator wanted to use computer vision and ML to inspect interior pipe walls in their well systems. The pitch sounded great. The reality: you can't get a robot or camera into most of those wells, the data they did have was unlabeled and inconsistent, and the team that would maintain the model didn't exist. We pulled the spec apart and replaced it with a small fiber-optic camera and a human review process — the same thing the field crews were already half-doing — but documented, batched, and reportable. One person reviewing footage at a desk beat a hypothetical AI pipeline nobody was going to maintain. That's a recurring pattern in Houston: the right answer is often less novel and more rigorous than the pitch deck suggested.

Questions I Actually Get Asked

Do you work with energy and oil-and-gas industry founders?

Most of my Houston engagements are industry-adjacent. Energy operators digitizing workflows, midstream companies building reporting tooling, ESG platforms — that's a comfortable wheelhouse. I've shipped real-time analytics on noisy field-data pipelines and replaced spreadsheet-driven reporting with proper databases more times than I can count.

Are you familiar with TMC and hospital-system integrations?

I've done work in healthcare-adjacent startups, including HIPAA-compliant data flows and EHR integration patterns. If you're building a tool that talks to a hospital system, the answer is almost always 'it's harder than your investor told you' — I can tell you exactly where the gotchas are before you sign a contract you'll regret.

Can we have on-site days at our Houston office?

Yes. I'm in The Woodlands and can be at your office same-day for greater Houston. I do on-site for Houston, Dallas, and Austin clients when it changes the outcome — kickoffs, architecture reviews, post-mortems, whiteboard sessions. Day-to-day work is remote because that's where the code gets written.

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 Houston-based teams in person?

I'm primarily remote-first, which means I can usually start faster. For Houston 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.