Founder & principal engineer
I started ShipAfterAI after seeing the same five problems in every AI-built MVP that crossed my desk in 2024 — and watching founders take avoidable losses because nobody told them what production actually requires. My job is to be the senior engineer you wish you had hired six months ago, without the $250k salary or the 30-day notice.
Previously: Staff Engineer at Stripe (payments infra, 2019–2023), Senior Engineer at GitLab (CI/CD, 2016–2019), and three early-stage CTO seats before that. I've shipped code that handled $4B in annual transaction volume; I've also been the person on call at 3 a.m. when a bad migration took it offline. Both perspectives matter.
I am not a generalist. I do one thing: read AI-built codebases honestly, and write down what I find in language a founder can act on. If your problem is design, marketing, or hiring sales — I'll tell you that and refer you to someone good.
Brooklyn & Austin · Available for US (ET / CT / PT) hours · Response within 1 business day
"We hired James because three other consultants told us our app was 'fine.' He wrote us a 14-page report that found a service-role key in our client bundle, no RLS on our user table, and an unverified Stripe webhook. We were two weeks from launching to 8,000 waitlist users. He paused the launch. We owe him the company."— Founder, seed-stage SaaS · Anonymized at request · Audit, March 2025
The team
Every audit and every hardening sprint is staffed by two of the five people on this page. We don't subcontract. We don't outsource. The person you meet on the intake call is the person reading your code on day three.
Principal Security Engineer
Leads the auth, RLS, and secrets tracks. Spent six years at Auth0 building enterprise SSO; before that, application security at a US fintech. The reason our reports never miss a privilege-escalation path.
Staff Engineer · Infra
Owns the deployment, backups, and observability tracks. Ten years on platform teams at Heroku and Fly.io. Has personally rolled back more bad deploys than he'd like to admit.
Senior Engineer · LLM systems
Specialist in the LLM track: spending caps, rate limits, prompt-injection surfaces, and grounded retrieval. Two years at Anthropic on developer experience before joining us in 2024.
Engineering Manager · Diligence
Runs technical due diligence engagements. Six years at a16z's portfolio engineering team reviewing pre- and post-Series-A codebases. Writes the diligence reports investors actually read.
Founder · Principal
17 years shipping production software. Staff Engineer at Stripe (2019–2023, payments infra), Senior Engineer at GitLab (CI/CD), and three early-stage CTO seats. Reads every audit report before it ships.
Operations & client lead
Your first point of contact. Handles intake, scheduling, NDAs, and access provisioning. Background in technical program management at Asana. The reason engagements start on time.
Track record
Independently owned. Not VC-funded. Not trying to grow into a 50-person consultancy. Honest, boring numbers.
Client list available under NDA · References on request after intake call
How we work
These aren't marketing copy. They're the reason we lose some deals — and keep the clients we do take, for years.
01
If we don't think you need an audit, we'll say so for free. If your codebase shouldn't be maintained, we'll say that on day three — not three months in.
02
Every engagement is quoted in writing before we start. If a project will go over scope, we tell you before we begin — not at the invoice.
03
We sign your NDA before access. Read-only credentials throughout. Everything we touch is logged. Your code is never used to train any model.
04
No subcontractors. No juniors learning on your code. No "AI agent" doing the review. The names on this page are the people doing the work.
05
Plain English summary up top. Engineering appendix in the back. Both useful, neither padded. If you can't understand the first page, we failed.
06
Five people, by design. We turn down work we can't staff well. The roadmap is to stay this size — not to become a 200-person consultancy.
Ready when you are
The first call is with James. Thirty minutes, no slides, no qualification questions. You describe the situation. He tells you whether we're the right fit — even if the answer is no.
In the first call we'll cover