Hey everyone. My name's Doug, and if you're getting this video, chances are we're a pretty good fit to work together. So this is a quick TL;DR on me: what I've been up to, how I can help you, and what the next steps look like.

Why work with me

I'm a lead engineer, around twelve years into full-stack engineering now. I had a previous life in marketing and analytics — I started out at Groupon doing paid search, acquisition automation, building internal tools — and the rest is history.

My typical stack is TypeScript end to end: Node, Express, Hono, React, different flavours of vanilla JS. I've built a lot of web extensions, and desktop apps in Rust. I dabble in Go, and there's a lot of Python in my client work at the moment because LLMs are flavour of the month.

The kind of work I take

Typically it's an early-stage startup, or at least a greenfield project — zero to one. I'll pick up an idea or a problem from a founder and translate it into a finished product, then take it through to first paying customers.

• That's UX and UI, and the design and development of the full-stack app, which for me these days is normally a monorepo.
• Postgres, or increasingly a knowledge graph in Neo4j, which I'm really enjoying.
• Product analytics wired up properly: PostHog, Sentry, maybe some Kafka, Grafana, Datadog.
• Hosted on GCP, AWS or Railway.

Where I shine most is taking an idea or a problem and owning it through to a solution. You can be extremely high-level with me. You can come top-down and say "Doug, we need this" — and I'll go and work out the rest.

What I'm working on

Most recently I've been a founding engineer at GrowthMatch, a Techstars alumni company, working with Shelby Stephens — an LLM-based AI video editor, which is the thing I'm actually recording this with.

I've also been working with Contra on a distributed content discovery network — which is nerd talk for scraping LinkedIn and Twitter feeds on behalf of 40,000 users to find them the very best freelance opportunities. As of recording we're about to hit five million opportunities found in the three months since launching. Pretty cool stuff.

How I work

I'm LLM-assisted, for myself and for clients, and I'm not completely reliant on it — but it does make me extremely fast and able to ship features very quickly, which is a huge boon as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't code without it anymore.

I've a previous life as a founder, too: three companies founded and exited from, all fairly small. The first was a fully automated voucher publisher, started in 2016 and exited twice by 2022. The second was a discount-extension blocker that stops Honey from taking your ecommerce margin — that ended up protecting around five million sessions, and was acquired as well.

I'm looking for a small team that likes to move fast, has big ideas, doesn't get bogged down in design by committee, and can work autonomously. I'm based in Prague on CET, but I'm not one to turn down an opportunity, so get hold of me if you're in the Americas as well — completely happy to chat.

I'm looking for at least forty hours. But as I've found myself, once I'm in and I'm owning a problem, you're going to get sixty to eighty, and I'm going to be laser-focused on the task at hand. That's another trait I picked up as a startup founder, alongside the resilience: you need a lot of gumption and get-up-and-go. High agency, full autonomy, and I'm looking to do the best work of my life.

One question before you get in touch

If this sounds like someone you need on your team, you can get hold of me on LinkedIn or by email. But let me ask one question of you first: how serious are you about hiring? Do you have an urgent need right now, or are you testing the waters?

If it's the latter — thanks for watching, thanks for getting this far, but I'm honestly not interested. I'm only looking for people doing serious work, who know they need someone who can ship fast, solid, clean code and understands everything around it: product analytics, marketing, acquisition, retention, reactivation, the whole funnel, and who can handle the SEO and the paid ads from a technical product point of view too.

I'm not looking for a micromanager. I'm not looking for a pick-up-and-drop-down contract role. I'm looking to make my mark, and I'm hoping it's going to be with you. So give me a shout, let's see what we can do, and I look forward to chatting soon.

Transcribed from the video and lightly edited for reading.