Work With Me
Looking for a Platform / SRE consultant who’ll tell you the truth about your infrastructure? Let’s talk.
How engagements typically work
1. A 30-minute call (free)
Tell me what’s hurting. I’ll ask a lot of questions and probably challenge a few assumptions. By the end you’ll know whether I can help, and if not, who probably can. No pitch deck. No “discovery phase” billed at consultant rates.
2. A written proposal (within a week)
Scope, deliverables, timeline, price. Fixed where it can be fixed, hourly where the problem genuinely can’t be scoped in advance. You’ll always know what you’re paying for before you agree.
3. The work
I work in two-week iterations with a written check-in at the end of each. You get the artifacts (code, IaC, docs, runbooks) in your repos, in your accounts, owned by you. Nothing lives only on my laptop.
4. Handover
When the engagement ends, your team can run what I built. That’s the test. If they can’t, the work wasn’t done.
Engagement models
| Model | When it fits | Typical commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed-scope project | You know what you want built or fixed. | 2–12 weeks |
| Fractional Platform / SRE | You need senior expertise but not a full-time hire yet. | 1–3 days/week, 3+ months |
| Advisory | You have a team; they need a sparring partner and occasional pair-programming. | 4–8 hours/month |
| Incident or audit | One-off review, post-mortem facilitation, production-readiness audit. | 1–2 weeks |
Who I’m a good fit for
- Series A–C startups scaling past the “one DevOps person heroically holding it together” stage.
- Engineering teams of 10–80 that need a platform but don’t yet have a platform team.
- Companies running on Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP, AWS - or evaluating whether they should be.
- Teams that have had one production incident too many and want to fix the system, not just the bug.
Who I’m probably not the right fit for
- Pure feature-development contracts. I’m an infrastructure and reliability person.
- “Implement this exact thing, don’t ask questions.” Half the value I bring is asking the right questions; if that’s not welcome, we’ll both be unhappy.
- Pre-revenue companies looking for an unpaid co-founder. Happy to give 30 minutes of free advice; not happy to bet my time on your equity.
- Anyone looking to outsource thinking. The teams I help most are the ones that engage with the work.
Logistics
- Location: Italy. Remote-first. Occasional on-site for kick-offs or workshops, anywhere in the EU.
- Languages: English and Italian.
- Time zone: CET. I overlap with US East Coast mornings and APAC late-evenings.
- Payment: SEPA / SWIFT. Invoicing from an Italian Partita IVA. Compliant with EU VAT rules.
Get in touch
The fastest way to start is a short email describing what’s going on. A few sentences is fine.
- Email: francesco.latini@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/francescolatini
- GitHub: github.com/checco
If your situation is sensitive (live incident, security issue), say so in the subject line - I’ll get back to you fast.