How do you charge?
€36 per hour, excluding VAT. Larger pieces of work get a written estimate before I start, and every invoice comes with a report of hours. The production infrastructure setup is a fixed-price package between €3,000 and €8,000, depending on what it includes. Operations clients have a monthly minimum of 10 hours, which covers the on-call commitment.
Do you work with existing teams, or only solo?
Both. Often I handle infrastructure and backend foundations while the in-house team ships product. I've led backend teams, and I've also been the only backend developer on a project.
What does “immediate response” mean exactly?
For clients on an operations agreement: critical incidents get a response right away, any day, any hour, weekends included. Everything else within one business day. What counts as critical is agreed in writing at the start, so it isn't debated during an outage.
How do contracts and invoicing work?
B2B, with a standard services contract and an NDA if you need one. Invoices come from my company in Bulgaria with EU VAT. For EU companies, reverse charge applies: a 0% VAT invoice against your VAT number.
Which time zone are you in?
EET (UTC+2/+3). Full overlap with European working hours, and with the US East Coast until early afternoon. Most communication is written; calls when they're actually needed.
Will we be locked in to you?
No. Work happens in your cloud accounts and your repositories from day one. Infrastructure is code, decisions are documented, and handover is part of the job, not a separate negotiation.
Can you take over an existing system that has grown organically?
Yes. That's what the audit is for: I map what exists, what's risky and what it costs, and we fix things in order of priority.
Do you do frontend or full product builds?
My own work is backend and infrastructure. For UI I bring a React developer and a designer I've worked with for years, under the same contract, so you still have one point of responsibility.
What about DORA specifically?
I operate infrastructure for a regulated EU financial entity today. Controls are mapped to the regulation article by article, incidents are classified in the logs, and the platform produces its own evidence: tested restores, CI gates, audit trails. If DORA applies to you, an audit includes a gap map against it.
Do you use AI in your work?
Yes, daily. I use AI tools to optimize processes and keep code quality high: reviews, tests, catching regressions, automating the repetitive parts. What ships is still my responsibility, and client code is handled under the contract and NDA.
Do you handle on-premise?
Yes. I've configured Proxmox VE with Kubernetes for a client, and I build hybrid setups across providers - for example DigitalOcean together with AWS.
Thanks, got it.