I provide fractional leadership and hands-on execution to level-up growing engineering teams.

Drawing on 15+ years of deep industry experience, I step into codebases to align technical standards, untangle blocking debt, and introduce modern AI workflows that improve developer velocity and app reliability.

Book a 30-min intro call

Brandon Solen

I would hire and/or work with Brandon again all day, any day, any time. Few team members engage so fully, with so much heart and care about what the team is building. He also cares deeply about his code and motivating others to raise their game.

CEO, Clarity · Board Chair, Zevia (NYSE)

How I work with your team

Strategic Leadership Meets Hands-On Execution

01 Greenfield

High-Velocity Mobile Product Launches

The Stuck State

You have a hard deadline to launch a brand-new mobile product, and you know what you want to build. What's missing is the senior engineer who can architect the platform and stand up a team fast enough to hit the date.

The Acceleration

I step in as your launch lead and write the core architecture myself. With 15+ years shipping apps used by millions, I design the cross-platform foundation and set the standards your engineers build against, with AI workflows in place from day one, so you launch on time with something built to scale.

02 Organizational

Team & Process Turnaround

The Stuck State

Your engineering team is frustrated and sprints keep slipping. Product and engineering have stopped communicating, and morale is low because shipping even a small update is a struggle.

The Turnaround

I embed with the team to find where the process is breaking down and cut the friction that's slowing everyone. I put lightweight ways of working in place, with the metrics to see whether they're holding, and get the team back to shipping on a schedule you can rely on.

03 Hands-On

Codebase & Architecture Rescue

The Stuck State

Technical debt on your app has reached a breaking point. Your engineers are afraid to touch the legacy code, small updates trigger big regressions, and most of the team's time goes to fighting fires instead of building.

The Rescue

I don't hand you an audit and walk away. I get into the code next to your engineers, untangle the legacy parts, and clear out the debt that's been blocking your roadmap.

04 Operational

AI-Leveraged Velocity

The Stuck State

The team wants to move faster, and a lot of what they do by hand could be sped up with AI tools. But no one senior owns rolling those tools out, so you're stuck between slow work and the risk of messy code or leaked data.

The Velocity

I set the standards and guardrails to bring AI tools into the team safely, then coach your engineers hands-on in using them well. They get faster at debugging and code review, and the gains stay in place after I'm gone.

Proven engineering impact

The results.

24 hrs → 30 mins

CI/CD Pipeline & Native Memory Optimization

The Impact

Took on a build bottleneck that was holding back a 10-person team. Led the team to track down memory issues and cut test and pipeline runtimes from 24 hours to under 30 minutes, so the team could ship on a predictable schedule again.

$50M+ Raised

Greenfield Architecture & Core Roadmap Delivery

The Impact

Owned the native iOS architecture under tight deadlines, delivering the core features and redesigns that investor milestones depended on. Partnered closely with Product and Design leadership to execute comprehensive app redesigns, introducing complex discovery features and personalized recommendation engines that boosted customer engagement. The work helped unlock back-to-back $20M and $30M funding rounds and scaled a retail app to more than 800K active users.

Stalled Refactor

Legacy Codebase Rescue & Cross-Platform Modernization

The Impact

Took ownership over a stalled year-long overhaul of a mature mobile app. Cleared out years of legacy debt and restructured the core frameworks and backend TypeScript/Node APIs, making the system more reliable and easier to maintain, with no downtime along the way.

Team Turnaround

Hiring, Team Restructuring & AI-Workflow Modernization

The Impact

Rebuilt and ran a 10-person engineering team, setting clear standards for how fast and how well it shipped while rebuilding trust and alignment with Product and Design partners. Hired native and cross-platform engineers, mentored senior engineers into staff roles, and piloted AI developer tools like Cursor and LLM repository indexing to roughly double output without putting the company's IP at risk.

Words from collaborators

What people say.

Founders, managers, peers, and designers I've worked alongside over the last sixteen years.

Brandon is a gem. He combines a powerful work ethic with high-level mobile development skills. His real special skill is his ability to drive a team.

ex-CEO, Yerdle

He gets the division of responsibilities necessary for a powerful, stable mobile client. Super smart and talented engineer with clear thinking and great communication.

Tech Lead, Square

If you're looking for an iOS developer, your search has likely just come to an end. Brandon's a top notch developer. He cares deeply about his work, down to getting every pixel just right.

CEO, Boldium

Brandon is one of the most talented iOS developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He doesn't just execute designs to perfection — he is an awesome partner and strategist.

Product + Strategy Leader, AI Consultant

Brandon is highly capable and meticulous, especially with UI. He built a 'StyleKit' library that simplified our UI styling greatly. He was fast but always took the time to write clean code.

Senior Software Engineer (former manager)

I worked closely with Brandon and was struck by his deep care for building the right user experience. Never backing down from trying out UI ideas, while making sure code quality was never compromised.

Designer

Let’s see if I can help.

Book a 30-min intro call