Nine months running engineering at a retail-intelligence company — and the clearest proof yet of how I work now: small team, high leverage, AI pair-programmers on everything.
I joined as interim CTO with a short handover from the departing CTO, then took over the roadmap: prioritising the team’s technical decisions while staying hands-on in the TypeScript and React codebase. The headline project was migrating a product database from MongoDB to ClickHouse — done with Claude assisting at every step — which made the data fast enough to sit a conversational, ChatGPT-like interface on top of it. Customers could suddenly ask questions of data they used to export to spreadsheets.
Two more things shipped in parallel: a major upgrade of the React Native mobile app, and a Reseller Prospecting Portal for Boticário — Brazil’s biggest beauty brand — an MVP built primarily with Claude that mined the existing user base to identify and qualify potential resellers.
What it proves: I can own a roadmap and a team without leaving the code, and AI tooling in my hands is a delivery multiplier, not a talking point.