Fractional CTO & AI Engineering Consultant

How I help

Lead

Fractional CTO or interim head of engineering

I sort out team structure, get technical debt under control and set a roadmap the business can plan around. I've run distributed teams of more than 50 engineers and made them measurably more productive.

Design

Architecture and modernisation

Systems that have to stay up and stand up to scrutiny: microservice, serverless and event-driven designs on AWS, CI/CD overhauls, and legacy monoliths moved across without downtime.

Build

Senior, hands-on engineering

When the team needs another experienced engineer, I write the code. Real-time platforms, fast React front ends, and SaaS products in TypeScript and Go.

AI specialist

AI, put to work.

I help teams use AI in two places: in the product their customers use, and in the way their engineers build it. The aim is working software and measurable gains, without the hype.

AI features in your product

LLM features built properly: retrieval over your own data, agents that call your tools and APIs, and evaluations so you know when it's working. On Claude, OpenAI or open models, with cost and privacy under control.

AI-assisted engineering

Rolling out coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Copilot across a team, with the guardrails, review habits and workflows that turn them into a real productivity gain.

Automation and agents

Taking repetitive work off people's plates, from workflow automation in tools like n8n to custom agents that triage, summarise and route work across the business.

AI strategy for leaders

Plain-English advice for founders and boards: where AI will pay off for your business, what it will cost to run, and what to build versus buy.

Built and measured: pith, my open-source Claude Code plugin 43% 88% Claude's correct root-cause diagnoses on 49 real failed CI runs, before and after pith. Read the case study Built with agents: Zines, my web and iOS product 85 production releases in four days, from one engineer directing AI coding agents under strict test-driven development. Read the case study

Selected work

Delivered in senior engineering leadership roles, before I founded DJPG Consulting.

Metric Gaming $300mcorporate valuation A first-time, exemplary GLI-33 pass for a sports betting platform Passing the world's toughest betting regulation first time, and the $300m valuation that followed. Read the case study UK Tote Group £5minvestment secured Building the Tote's platform from the ground up A new platform for the Tote after its private equity acquisition, from board pitch to a go-live with three bugs in four months. Read the case study Manchester Airports Group 85%less routine developer work Turning airport web infrastructure into a global SaaS product From a late-night boardroom question to a multi-tenant platform resold to airports worldwide. Read the case study Travel Counsellors 100%of engineers adopted AI tools Getting a travel platform ready for its busiest month Getting the platform ready for January's peak, with every engineer working with AI tools. Read the case study

Track record

From previous leadership roles.

$1.6m

taken out of annual operating costs by restructuring teams and how they were resourced.

36%

more output from a department after clearing its bottlenecks and realigning distributed teams.

$300m

of company valuation growth supported by an exemplary pass of GLI-33, a strict global regulatory standard.

Open source

Things I build and contribute to in my own time.

pith
Python

A Claude Code plugin that cuts failing CI logs to about 4k tokens. On a 49-run benchmark, Claude's correct diagnoses rose from 43% to 88%.
Case study
agent-keychain
Rust

An encrypted, local-first keychain that makes AI agents ask before they use a secret, with per-request approval, time-limited grants and an audit log.
GitHub
Floci
Java

Merged contributions to the 26k-star open-source AWS emulator: AppConfig feature flags for the AppConfig Agent and Lambda extension, and Docker connection pooling.
Pull requests

About

Dan Goodwin, seated in a green leather armchair in a book-lined study — Dan Goodwin, founder

I've spent more than ten years in software, moving between leading engineering organisations and writing production code. Clients usually bring me in when they need both at once.

I'm a full-stack engineer. On the front end that means React, Angular and TypeScript; on the back end, .NET, Node.js and serverless Go, mostly on AWS. I've taken a B2B SaaS product from concept to commercial launch. More and more of my work now involves AI, both in products and in how engineering teams operate.

I work through my own company, DJPG Consulting Ltd, on contract or fractional terms.

Engineering leadership, hands on.