panthershark
Engineering & leadership · AI · Hiring & team

You're funded. You're growing. Now build the next great version of your company.

It usually starts with one thing: ship faster, add AI, bring in senior experience, or invent what's next while your team stays focused on the core product. As you grow, even small changes touch more people. I quickly get a clear read on where you are, then work with you on the plan to get to the next phase. It's never just engineering.

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Services

  • Engineering & leadership

    Hands-on leadership as your fractional CTO, alongside the leader you already have, or owning a new initiative end to end. In the work every day, from customer conversations to product decisions to code.

    Strategy · Product · Architecture · Infrastructure · Ops · Compliance

  • Advisory

    Ongoing strategy and technical review for founders and leadership teams. The focus is making your team stronger, not doing the work for them.

    Strategy · Technical review · Team building · Leadership

  • AI, put to work

    Find where AI actually helps, then build it. Start by looking at how the work gets done today, or jump straight to building.

    Workflows · Prototypes · Production

  • Hiring your technical leader

    Need a full-time technical leader? I'll run the search with you: shape the role, run a sharp interview process, and give you a straight recommendation.

    Role · Interviews · Technical assessment

No staff augmentation, no bench. You work with me directly.

How I work

From one phase to the next.

Every engagement is shaped by what the company needs, and it's always more than one thing. The shape changes as you go. The quality bar doesn't.

  1. Get a clear read

    A fast, honest look at where the product, platform and team are today.

  2. Plan it together

    A plan for the move to the next phase, built with your leaders, not handed to them.

  3. Make the move

    Leading, building, hiring or advising, usually some of each.

  4. Grow or step back

    Sometimes the work grows into a full-time role. Often it ramps down to advising until your team has fully taken over.

  • Impact first

    Work on what moves the business. Sometimes that's cutting the roadmap in half, merging platforms, paying down the debt that slows every release, or a pivot.

  • Make impossible states impossible

    There's never a good time to find an unexpected bug. Keep the data, code and process simple enough that the wrong thing can't happen in the first place.

  • Build to learn

    The fastest way to understand a problem is to build something real and see what it teaches you. Progress over perfection, then keep improving what works.

  • Straight answers

    You'll hear what I think, including when it's not what you hoped. Bad news is cheapest early.

Stories

From the boardroom to the codebase.

The same week can include a board conversation and a code review. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Advisor · Leadership transition

The founding engineer is moving on.

A successful company was losing the engineer who got them to product-market fit. A short technical assessment made the need clear: a new engineering lead and CTO, based locally. That assessment became a technical and team profile that shaped the search. After the founders' phone screens, I ran the technical interviews, mostly system design, looking for the right match in both skills and culture.

It was a nuanced handoff on a tight timeline, for the people and for delivery.

Engineering leader · AI-first rebuild

Same starting point, different answer.

Another company's founding engineer moved on. This time I stepped in as the engineering leader and shifted the company to an AI-first rebuild. The first step was sorting out what the v1 platform did well and how v2 would work with AI at its core.

The hard part wasn't building a system that could reason through ambiguous problems with AI and platform code. It was making those decisions and applying them to a large underlying engine in under four seconds.

Hands-on leadership · Scaling

From 5 engineers to 35 after a Series A.

The original team kept moving fast, and at the new size a late-night change could become everyone's problem by morning. We started by watching how work actually moved, then made small improvements one at a time. Better testing, more automation and steadier release habits added up, and the whole team kept shipping quickly.

The founders shifted from writing the code to leading the people who write it. The company kept growing and was later acquired.

About

I'm Tommy Messbauer, an engineering leader who still builds.

I like open-ended problems, the ones without a clear answer yet. They need empathy for the people, a feel for how the company really works, and real technical depth. I bring all three.

I've built software for more than 25 years and startups since 2010, for everyone from Google, Microsoft, Dell and HP to financial institutions, hardware makers and brand-new companies. You get big-company rigor without the big-company weight.

Google
Engineering leadership for three critical, highly visible teams, about 20 engineers
Enterprise
Lead engineer on massive-scale e-commerce, online learning, customer support, content management and community platforms, including for Microsoft, Dell and HP
Startups
Building since 2010, including three startups taken from idea to full product
Finance
Banking and financial services platforms in high-security, regulated environments
Hardware
Rebuilt a large-scale system behind an enterprise collaboration product
Based in
Austin, Texas
Contact

Tell me what you're working on.

I work with a few companies at a time and choose them carefully. If it's not a fit, I'll tell you on the first call.