Vertrical

The short version

At Vertrical I worked across healthcare, pharmaceutical and ecommerce products. Consultancy work meant getting comfortable with unfamiliar domains quickly, asking useful questions and communicating technical decisions to people with very different contexts.

The work covered React and TypeScript on the frontend, Node.js and Go services on the backend, and distributed communication with gRPC and Kafka.

From discovery to delivery

Some engagements started with an existing product that needed modernising. Others started with technical discovery, evaluation and a proof of concept before anyone knew which direction was worth pursuing.

My role stretched across those stages: understanding the problem, testing an approach, presenting it to stakeholders and then helping turn it into production software.

Platform work

I worked on testing, refactoring and modernising systems rather than treating delivery as a sequence of isolated features. That included Go services, gRPC communication and Kafka-based workflows alongside React, TypeScript and Node.js product work.

One project included adaptive reCAPTCHA: applying stronger bot protection when the risk justified it without adding the same friction to every user.

Communicating the work

Consultancy engineering is partly about code and partly about making a good decision legible. Technical findings and proofs of concept were presented to stakeholders so that trade-offs, risks and next steps were clear.

“His contributions were on par with the much more experienced members of his team.” — Sheraz Sarwar, CTO at Vertrical

What I took from it

The best consultants do not arrive with one favourite answer. They understand the product, learn the constraints and then choose the smallest useful way forward.