Miles HuffmanBook a Fractional Engagement
[00]Fractional offerings
1 external slot open

Three plug-and-play
engagements.

Each is scoped for a part-time, remote cadence of 16–20 hours per week — built to slot into a founder-led, SMB, or venture-backed team and deliver compounding value from week one. I take on a strict maximum of three concurrent engagements so each one gets a real operator's attention — not a thin slice of a stretched calendar.

16–20 hrs / weekRemoteOperator + Engineer
01

SaaS Consolidation & ERP Migration De-Risking

Collapse a sprawl of overlapping SaaS subscriptions into one system you own, and safely connect your dashboards, internal tools, and AI agents to it — without ever exposing the system of record to write-corruption.

Why it's credible

Built and operates in production — the Swiss Link Merchandiser's paranoid read-only Odoo guard, materialization layer, and lock-contention defenses.

What I deliver

  • A fail-closed, allowlist-only read-only access layer for your system of record
  • A materialized local cache for fast analytics that never hammers production
  • Concurrency hardening so background jobs and syncs never collide
  • A migration & SaaS-reduction roadmap framed by an operator who has owned the P&L the data sits on

Ideal buyer

Founder-led e-commerce, distribution, and manufacturing teams — plus Series A–C startups — buried under SaaS sprawl and afraid to let new tools touch their ERP.

02

Custom AI Internal Tooling

A single internal tool you own that collapses a recurring manual workflow — feed/catalog publishing, lifecycle email, inventory & sales reporting, audience automation — into a governed, one-click pipeline, and retires the SaaS seat you were renting to do it.

Why it's credible

This is the Swiss Link Merchandiser itself — a 30+ module FastAPI/React platform with a documented design system, feed publishers, and an automation engine.

What I deliver

  • A clean, documented UI with high tooltip coverage and shareable deep-linked state
  • Shipped with CI, semantic versioning, and tests — not a throwaway script
  • Optional packaged local installer for single-user operational tools
  • Built fast with agentic AI workflows (Cursor, Antigravity) — then hardened with the tests, CI, and versioning a senior hire would demand

Ideal buyer

SMB and mid-market ops or growth teams drowning in spreadsheet-and-export busywork — or paying for a SaaS seat that does less than a tool they could simply own.

03

Fractional Operations & Technical Governance

Operator-grade operational and financial controls brought into your AI-assisted development practice — so your team ships fast, stays auditable, and keeps complexity from creeping back in. A fractional COO / 'AI Chief of Staff' between risk and velocity.

Why it's credible

Demonstrated in my repos — alwaysApply Cursor safety rules, guard scripts, full CI/CD — paired with 8 years running operations and the P&L, and a live SaaS-to-self-owned ERP consolidation.

What I deliver

  • Non-negotiable safety, compliance & design standards encoded as machine-enforced rules
  • Architecture-as-source-of-truth docs that govern both engineers and AI prompts
  • Guard scripts and CI gates that keep generated code aligned and auditable
  • Inventory, margin, and operational reporting frameworks that actually get used

Ideal buyer

Lean teams — from founder-led operators to venture-backed startups — scaling AI dev velocity that need adult supervision on risk without slowing down.

[04]Why this translates

“But you run a surplus company — not a startup.”

Fair question, and the honest answer is that the discipline is what transfers, not the industry. A fail-closed access layer protecting a system of record is the same engineering whether it holds surplus inventory or SaaS revenue. Collapsing four rented vendors into one self-owned Odoo platform under live load is the same complexity and migration risk a scaling startup faces. The domain changes; the judgment — and the instinct to reduce dependency — doesn't.

Real P&L ownership

Eight years owning a balance sheet, inventory, and margin — the stakes were my own money, not a line item in someone else’s budget.

Production, under load

My ERP migration and tooling run a live business today. This isn’t a sandbox or a side project — it can break, so it can’t.

Frontier-adjacent build

Hyphan — an idle-GPU compute marketplace with hardware-safety guardrails — is exactly the venture-grade systems thinking this work demands.

[05]Transparent pricing

Up-front rates. No discovery-call gatekeeping.

A fractional engagement runs roughly 16–20 hours per week — about 60–70% of the cost of a full-time senior operator-engineer, with the range of a whole team. Pick the shape that fits the problem.

Start here · Low risk

The 2-Week Diagnostic

Not ready to commit to a retainer? Start with a fixed-scope, two-week paid diagnostic. I embed as an operator, map your highest-leverage bottleneck and its risk surface, and hand back a concrete build plan you own — whether or not we continue.

  • Written bottleneck & risk audit
  • Prioritized, scoped build plan
  • Architecture & migration recommendations
  • Fully credited toward a retainer if we proceed

Low-risk by design: fully credited toward a retainer if we continue, and ongoing engagements run month-to-month — no long lock-in. If the first month isn't clearly worth it, we part ways clean.

Flat fee

$2.5–$4K

A genuinely low-risk way to see how I work before any longer commitment — and it's credited in full toward your first month if we move forward.

Founding-client offer

My first two engagements get founding-client pricing and a direct hand in shaping how I work. In exchange, I ask for a reference and a testimonial.

Book a diagnostic

Or step straight into one of the ongoing engagement shapes below.

Lighter retainer

Advisory

$6–$8K/ month

A standing seat at the table for strategy, architecture review, and de-risking decisions — without a full embed.

  • Architecture & migration risk review
  • Standing strategic & ops advisory
  • Async access between sessions

Best for: a team that mostly needs senior judgment on call.

Core engagement

Core 16–20 hrs / week

Embedded

$8–$12K/ month

The main engagement. I embed as a part-time operator-engineer and ship real, governed software at a steady cadence.

  • 16–20 hrs/week, 3-month minimum
  • Ships production software, not decks
  • ≈ 60–70% cheaper than a full-time hire
  • Effective rate ~$100–$150/hr

Best for: the highest-leverage ongoing operational problem.

Fixed-scope project

Build Sprint

$15–$40K/ project

Outcome-priced and milestone-based — de-risk one ERP migration or ship one internal tool, end to end.

  • Milestone-based, fixed scope
  • Outcome pricing, not hourly
  • Clear deliverable & acceptance criteria

Best for: one well-defined build or migration.

Hourly anchor

$200–$300/hr for ad-hoc, discovery, or overflow work — a reference rate, not the primary offer.

Commitment discount

10–15% off retainers for a 6–12 month commitment — alignment rewarded.

Equity (optional)

For the right cash-light startup, I'll consider layering in a small equity component. Mission first.

[06]How it works
Week 1

Map the bottleneck

I embed as an operator, audit the workflow and the risk surface, and identify the highest-leverage build.

Weeks 2–4

Ship the first tool

A governed, tested, deployable internal tool or access layer — real software, not a slide deck.

Ongoing

Govern & scale

Iterate, encode standards as enforced rules, and extend coverage at a steady fractional cadence.

See the proof in the case studies