$ cat about.md
James Ebentier — software architect based in Berlin. I embed with engineering teams to unblock hard technical decisions and mentor the people who'll own the system long after I'm gone.
I'm a fractional architect: I join a team for a defined stretch — weeks or months, not years — to help you make the technical calls that are hard to make from the inside. Platform direction, delivery bottlenecks, architectural debt, the migration you've been putting off. I bring an outside perspective, hands-on depth, and a bias toward leaving things clearer than I found them.
This isn't a pitch deck or a services menu. The work speaks through what I've shipped and what I've written. If those resonate, we might be a good fit.
Mentorship is the through-line. The best fractional engagements aren't about one person swooping in to save the day — they're about making the team around you stronger: senior engineers who need a sounding board, tech leads stepping into architecture for the first time, groups that want a shared vocabulary for how systems should evolve.
I care about developer experience, feedback loops, and the unglamorous infrastructure that lets product teams move fast without breaking things. If you've read my resume, you'll see that thread running through years of platform and enablement work — it's the same instinct, applied on a smaller, sharper scope.
Get in touch
Curious whether an outside architect could help your team? Drop me a line — no pitch, just a conversation.
Work with me