M Alexander Tech
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Senior tech leadership for organizations that have outgrown “figure it out as we go.”

I partner with Series A–C founders and CEOs to untangle complex tech stack decisions, fix execution bottlenecks, and build engineering teams that deliver.

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Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander | Tech Advisory

Track Record & Scale

Over 15 years leading engineering organizations from hands-on mobile engineering to 100+ person teams across category-defining platforms:

  1. Fanatics

    VP of Engineering

    Led a 100-person engineering organization building the unified identity and loyalty foundation for Fanatics' digital sports ecosystem. Re-architected legacy infrastructure into a single high-throughput, regulated platform—seamlessly connecting millions of fans across multi-vertical commerce and gaming properties.

  2. SeatGeek

    Senior Director of Engineering

    Led consumer product engineering through the live-events shutdown and subsequent post-pandemic rebound. Modularized a core monolith architecture to support record-breaking concurrent onsale traffic and peak transaction scale as live events returned.

  3. Spotify

    Director of Engineering

    Rose from IC engineer (built Spotify's first video ad product) to Director over 5.5 years. Scaled full-stack engineering organizations across ad monetization, self-serve advertiser portals, and core ad-serving infrastructure.

Advisory Services & Engagements

Technical Audit & Stack Assessment

2–3 Week Engagement

Best for: CEOs, board members, or founders needing an independent evaluation of stack health, architecture, or team output.

Scope & Deliverables

  • Pragmatic audit of system architecture, deployment pipelines, and technical debt.
  • Identification of single-vendor lock-in, operational risks, and single-point-of-failure owners.
  • Evaluation of delivery velocity: separating genuine engineering complexity from organizational friction.
  • Actionable, prioritized 6-month technical roadmap tied directly to business outcomes.

Executive Thought Partnership

Strategic Retainer

Best for: CEOs managing CTOs, or founding engineers stepping into executive leadership.

Scope & Deliverables

  • Bi-weekly strategy and alignment sessions.
  • Translating board goals into clear engineering execution plans.
  • Pragmatic guidance on build vs. buy decisions, vendor contract exits, and team structure.
  • Senior hiring support and candidate evaluation for Director, VP, and Principal roles.

Fractional Engineering Executive

10–15 hrs/week

Best for: Series A–C companies navigating major platform modernizations, technical reorganizations, or leadership transitions.

Scope & Deliverables

  • Embedded executive leadership guiding platform extractions without halting feature delivery.
  • Structuring vendor abstractions to maintain architectural flexibility.
  • Establishing lightweight RFC frameworks and operational guardrails that let teams ship safely.

Strategic Stances

Visibility Alone Doesn't Fix Velocity

Health dashboards and service catalogs show where problems sit, but they cannot fix them on their own. Real operational momentum comes from establishing a simple, recurring forum that picks a single metric or bottleneck and intentionally drives it down.

Supportive Leadership Requires a Mechanism to Say "No"

Being an effective executive is not about avoiding trade-offs or approving every pet project. The most supportive environment you can create for an engineering team is one with a clear, legitimate framework to draw a cut line and focus on what actually matters.

Service Boundaries Only Hold Up When They Reflect How the Business Operates

Systems should be partitioned around distinct, long-term capabilities rather than split because two teams want to avoid working together. Architecture must reflect core business domain functions rather than team preferences or organizational friction.

Technical Choices Require Team Enablement

An architecture is only as good as your team's ability to operate it in production. Adopting sophisticated tools or new stack patterns requires an intentional plan to build the team's operational capability to maintain, monitor, and evolve those systems reliably under load.