Hi, I'm Gareth

I'm an engineer and founder with deep experience growing startups.

I built my own startup, Tinker, to profitability and a billion dollars in volume, and have helped many others grow their companies as a lead or fractional CTO.

If you'd like to work with me, let's connect at the links below, or scroll to learn more about me. You can also read some of my writing.

Here's some of the work I've done in the past.

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Fractional CTO

Various Startups

I help teams from pre-seed to series-B solve engineering or management challenges.

TypescriptPythonSupabasePostgresTailwindNextJS

Deliver high-priority projects on a tight timeline when the existing team lacks bandwidth or specific expertise.
Translate founder vision into engineering plans the team can execute on predictably. Add rigour to time estimation to increase team trust.
Develop recruiting strategies. Advise on ideal team composition, candidate profiles and where to find them.

2022 - 23

Payments Engineering Lead

TrueNorth

Led the effort to re-build the company's struggling payments workflows. The solutions I found unlocked 4x growth over three quarters and the company's series B.

ReactDjangoMaterial UIGraphQL

Took ownership of the AR/AP workflow problem, which was known to be blocking growth, but poorly defined as it crossed team boundaries
Built relationships and trust with each team through empathy and responsiveness, learned their challenges through user interviews and observation.
Developed a strategy that balanced teams’ different requirements against engineering feasibility to focus on low hanging fruit first, then build 100x scalability afterwards.
GMV went from stagnant to growing 4.5x over three quarters after after these new workflow entered use
Advised the CTO on recruiting pipelines and team composition. Had a direct hand in signing 3 senior-level hires from FAANG companies.

2020 - 22

CEO/Engineer

Tinker

Tinker was the first professional blockchain HFT firm and the largest trader in the industry. I led the team from idea through to profitability, acquisition offers, and billions of dollars of trades.

PythonTensorflowPostgresRabbitMQ

Built our proprietary trading engine from scratch to $2m daily transaction volume in only 8 months. Parts of this codebase are now public on github.
Solved hard technical challenges to allow simultaneous high frequency trading on 20+ different venues, each with unpredictable response times and other API characteristics.
Led a team of 3 full-time engineers + contractors for legal, accounting, and design.
Turned hard compliance and regulatory challenges into strategic wins. Secured the only high-level partnership with a major Canadian bank in the industry, giving us access to high level financial services while competitors struggled to open chequing accounts.
Designed successful risk mitigation strategies to security, counterparty, and asset price risks.
Ran fundraising for our $2m seed round from YC, SVAngel and other prominent VCs.

2014 - 19