About
Gabe Giro
Fractional Engineering Leader · Android · Mentoring · Architecture
I've spent 12+ years building software — most of it deep in Android, the rest across architecture, platform work, and leading teams. I started as the engineer who got handed the hard parts: the streaming client that had to work on every device, the codebase nobody wanted to refactor, the launch that couldn't slip. Somewhere along the way I realized the highest-leverage thing I did wasn't writing code — it was making the decisions that kept other people's code from becoming a problem.
Today I work as a fractional engineering leader. I embed with founders and small teams as the senior technical person they don't yet have full-time — setting architecture direction, reviewing the work, leading hiring, and shipping production code alongside their developers. I'm hands-on by default. Strategy without execution is rarely useful, and I'd rather be in the PR than in the slide deck.
What makes the math work is leverage. I build with Claude — an orchestrator plus a worker swarm I've been refining for over a year — which is why I can deliver at a fraction of a senior engineer's manual rate and still ship like a small team. That's the differentiator I bring to every engagement: senior judgment, applied at AI speed, billed transparently.
Track record
A few of the products I've helped build over the years.
HBO Max / HBO GO
Android architecture and platform work on streaming apps at global scale.
Yahoo Daily Fantasy
Architectural work on the Android client for a high-traffic fantasy-sports product.
Journey Rewards
Kotlin Multiplatform delivery — shared business logic across Android and iOS.
RankRush.ai
Built and shipped an AI SEO product end to end, including a full migration off Lovable to a maintainable stack.
AppRabbit (archived)
Android and platform engineering on a mobile product before the project wound down.
How I work
A handful of things I believe about building software.
Boring decisions early, interesting decisions never
Language, framework, hosting, build pipeline — I lock these down on day one so nobody relitigates them six months in. The parts that should be exciting are the product and the team, not the infrastructure underneath them.
Leave the team more capable than I found it
I review PRs and pair with your developers so the patterns get written down and the next hire ramps faster. The goal is not to ship better code on my watch — it is to raise the team's senior judgment so the quality holds after I am gone.
Honest estimates, including the uncertainty
I give you the band, not the optimistic floor. Named risks with owners and dates beat a confident number that slips. Stakeholders get the version that is hard to hear before it becomes a surprise.
Leverage is the product, not the hours
I build with Claude — an orchestrator plus a worker swarm I have been refining for over a year. That is why my dev rate is a third of the manual equivalent. You pay for the output, and the leverage gets shared transparently.
Outside work
I live in Zagreb with my partner Karlina. When I'm not in a codebase you'll usually find me around live music — I play with gypsy bands and have spent years in the folklore-and-dance world — or tinkering with the AI agent stack that powers most of my work. Half of what I ship started as a "what if I automated this" experiment that got out of hand.
Want to talk through your situation?
Start with a free 15-minute call. No pitch deck, no commitment — just an honest conversation about your team and where I might help.
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