I'm James Elkins, an independent software engineer and former Engineering Manager at Modern Treasury. I build and ship production software, own integrations, and work through releases and production problems.
I can join your team as a hands-on staff engineer or take on fractional CTO responsibilities, depending on what you need.
Someone to own the engineering plan, architecture, and delivery, and build with the team.
For post-revenue B2B software companies that need a senior technical lead without making a full-time hire. Typically, founder-led teams of roughly 5–30 people.
I work with the founder and engineers to:
Decide what to build next and what to stop building.
Build and ship product features and integrations with the team.
Make architecture decisions and review code and technical hiring.
Work through releases and production problems with the team.
The monthly retainer is scoped by time commitment. We agree on responsibilities, fees, and notice terms in writing before work starts.
Work out where AI is worth using before you commit to building.
For teams with a recurring manual workflow, such as claims follow-up, document preparation, or reconciliation, that want a clear assessment of where AI could help.
I examine the workflow with the people who run it. You receive:
A map of the steps, data, handoffs, and failure points.
Prioritized agent use cases, including risks and human-review points.
A recommendation on what to build, buy, or keep manual.
The sprint is an assessment. Prototyping and implementation are separate follow-on work, scoped if needed. You can use the recommendation with your existing team or discuss further work with me.
Already have technical leadership and need someone to build? I also work directly with engineering teams on product development, integrations, and production reliability, including ongoing engagements. Discuss software engineering work.
Consulting scope, time commitment, and fees are agreed in writing before work starts. All fees in USD. See engagement terms and pricing.
Owning integration surfaces for prior authorizations.
The platform moves prior authorizations from order to approval across eligibility, benefits, submission, and exception paths, writing results back into the EMR where clinical staff work.
I owned engineering across the external-integration surface: the authorization workflow and routing, eligibility and payer modeling, payer-submission lanes including browser automation and direct EMR reads, operator tooling for stuck states, and reliability and privacy controls.
Year-long engagement covering greenfield lanes, hardening, and go-live correctness work.
Recruiting client
Recruiting software · engineering
Candidate search, rosters, and resume content in one platform.
Recruiters work through candidate pipelines for company positions, searching across people, notes, resumes, and roster activity.
I build and improve search and data paths, including resume parsing and search, filter reliability, and background-job and deployment hardening.
