Why I Moved into Consulting Full-Time

Like many in the tech industry, I spent most of my career employed full-time while occasionally picking up short-term consulting contracts to help clients with specific issues. One of those clients — a banking software company — brought me on for what was supposed to be a two-month engagement to address performance issues in a legacy system.

I quickly identified the root cause and provided several solution paths. They decided to shift to another product, which introduced new problems. Then another product. And another. What started as a small engagement grew into an eight-month journey where I dove deep into nearly every product in their portfolio.

Each week presented something new — a different system, a fresh challenge, a complex decision point. I went from troubleshooting brittle legacy databases to architecting modern, scalable replacements. And I loved it.

It was the most engaging, energizing period of my professional life. The variety. The pace. The impact. It reminded me why I got into this field in the first place: to solve hard problems and help organizations build better systems.

That experience gave me the clarity to go all-in on consulting. Now, I get to do that kind of work every day — solving meaningful problems, designing systems that scale, and delivering results that matter.

If you’re facing a challenge with your data systems — performance, migration, architecture, or ML integration — I’d be happy to help.