Senior Software Engineer & Solution Architect · Australia
Software engineering and technology consulting for Australian businesses
Build it. Modernise it. Scale it.
Sixteen years building, modernising and scaling software — backend systems, APIs, cloud infrastructure and AI. You work directly with the engineer doing the work, not an account manager between you and it.
Pratik Vanol
Senior Software Engineer & Solution Architect
Geelong, VIC · Working across Australia
- Years engineering software
- 16+Years engineering software
- Years in Laravel specifically
- 8+Years in Laravel specifically
- API performance recovered on a legacy platform
- Up to 80%API performance recovered on a legacy platform
- AI platform built, shipped and operated
- LiveAI platform built, shipped and operated
Selected companies and products worked with
- Squava
- PepsiCo
- HN Healthcare
- Emxcel Travel Solutions
- Gateway Technolabs
Where people usually start
What is actually going wrong?
Most enquiries arrive as one of these. If one of them sounds like your situation, the relevant page goes into what fixing it involves.
You need something built
A web application, a SaaS product, an API or an internal tool — and you want one experienced person accountable for it working, not a team you never meet.
Your system is ageing badly
It still runs the business, but every change is slow and risky, and someone has quoted you for a full rewrite. There is usually a better answer than starting again.
It has become slow
What was fast when you launched is not fast now that the data has grown. The cause is usually queries and architecture, and it is usually fixable without larger servers.
You want to use AI properly
Not an AI strategy — one or two specific things done automatically that a person does today, plus an honest answer on which of your ideas are actually worth building.
Deploying makes you nervous
Releases are manual, environments differ, the cloud bill keeps climbing, and the person who set it all up has left the company.
Something else?
Most real problems do not arrive neatly categorised. Describe it in your own words and you will get a straight answer on whether it is something worth working on together.
Selected work
Software that is running in production
Real systems, real constraints, and the reasoning behind the decisions. Every figure below is measured, not estimated.
Services
What I can take responsibility for
From a single audit to owning a product end to end. Each of these is a real engagement type, not a capability list.
Pratik Vanol
Senior Software Engineer & Solution Architect
Sixteen years of building software, most of it deep in backend systems, databases and architecture — and still writing the code.
Why work with me
Why an Australian business would trust me with this
Sixteen years, still writing code
Long enough to have seen how decisions age, and still hands-on enough to implement them. Not a strategist who stopped building a decade ago, and not a developer who has only seen one way of doing things.
One point of accountability
You talk to the person doing the engineering. No account manager translating your problem into a ticket, and no gap between the person who understood the requirement and the person writing the code.
Depth where it matters
Backend architecture, databases and performance — the areas where a wrong decision is expensive and hard to reverse later. Plus the cloud and frontend work needed to actually finish a project.
Products that are live, not slides
PotatoAIHub is a real AI platform in production, built and operated end to end. The AI, architecture and cloud advice offered here is practised rather than researched.
An honest read on your problem
Including when the answer is that you do not need the thing you were about to buy. A project that should not have been built helps neither of us.
It can scale when the project does
Small work is delivered personally. Larger work is built by my own offshore engineering team, while architecture, decisions and your point of contact stay exactly where they were.
How delivery works
One local contact. Engineering capacity that scales.
You contract with me, here in Australia. I own requirements, architecture, technical decisions and delivery leadership, and that does not change at any project size — it is the whole point of hiring a senior engineer rather than an agency.
When a project needs more built in parallel than one person can build, it is delivered by my own offshore engineering team — people I have worked with and led for years, working to a specification I wrote, against code I review.
And if what you need is engineers rather than a project, that is available directly: dedicated developers working as an extension of your team, with me as the local technical contact who stays accountable for what they produce.
What this deliberately avoids is the handoff — sold to by one person, then passed to another who was in none of the earlier conversations. Offshore delivery fails when nobody senior owns the outcome, not because the work happens somewhere else. Here that person is local, named, and the one you already spoke to.
None of which means the team sits behind me. If you would rather deal with the engineers directly — a weekly call, a shared channel, whatever suits how you already work — that is entirely fine. The only thing that does not move is who answers for the result.
One contract, one owner
You contract with an Australian business, ABN registered here in Geelong, invoiced in AUD. The delivery arrangement behind it is mine to manage, not yours to coordinate.
Engineers, not tickets
Dedicated developers who stay on your work long enough to actually understand it — briefed, reviewed and answered for by me.
Your working hours, not theirs
The team shifts to overlap your day where a project needs it, rather than leaving you a narrow window late in the afternoon to get anything answered.
Cost that matches the scope
Senior architecture where a wrong decision is expensive to reverse, and cost-effective delivery capacity where the work is volume.
Insights
Writing about the work
Notes on modernisation, performance, cloud and AI — written from projects actually delivered rather than assembled from search terms.
Have a software problem, project or idea?
Tell me what you are trying to achieve and where it is currently going wrong. You will get an honest read on it from someone who has built this kind of thing before — including if the answer is that you do not need what you were about to buy.
Prefer not to call? Send me a message
Working with businesses across Australia — Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and regional Australia.