A one-person engineering practice, run seriously.
Barnabás Szőke — senior software engineer with 15+ years of experience, based in Budapest.
Barnabás has spent his career designing and delivering APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, cloud-native platforms, and distributed architectures for global companies — including Sky, Tesco, ClearScore, Gamesys, Lufthansa Systems, and Ladbrokes Coral.
The work has spanned global video streaming platforms, retail pricing systems, financial platforms, gaming systems, aviation software, and SaaS products — with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, performance, and pragmatic technical delivery.
SteerScale exists because plenty of teams need senior, hands-on help for a defined window — not a permanent hire, not a body-shop contractor, not a deck. The bet: one senior engineer, embedded properly, ships more useful work in a quarter than a five-person agency will in a year.
The practice stays small on purpose. One or two engagements at a time, written status every Friday, real code in your repository by Monday.
Four working principles.
Boring is a feature.
Most production systems fail for boring reasons. We solve the boring problems first and reach for novelty only when it earns its place.
Write it down.
Architecture decision records, runbooks, weekly written status. If a decision isn't in a doc your team can read, it didn't really happen.
Ship in your repo.
The deliverable is working code on your branch, in your CI, reviewed by your engineers. Not a separate playground.
Leave it owned.
A handoff isn't a slide deck — it's two of your engineers comfortable making the next change without us in the room.
Where the production hours come from.
What we reach for, day to day.
Languages
- Java, Kotlin, Scala
- Python
- TypeScript, JavaScript
Frameworks
- Spring Boot, Spring WebFlux, Quarkus, Akka
- FastAPI
- React, Next.js (when needed)
Cloud & platform
- AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker
- Terraform, Jenkins, ArgoCD
Data & messaging
- Kafka, RabbitMQ, REST, WebSocket
- Cassandra, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch
Observability
- Prometheus, Grafana, ELK
- Splunk, AppDynamics
AI
- LangChain, RAG, AI agents
- Pinecone, vector DBs, prompt engineering