From "Impossible" to Shipped.

AI-Native Builder • Engineering Leader • Scale Up & Scale Down

20+ years in engineering. 6+ years leading globally distributed teams. ~350 people scaled at peak. €19M+ budgets owned. These days I ship AI-native products by day, build more of them by night, and help founders, CEOs and CTOs do the same without the consulting theater. Real delivery, not slide decks - whether that means scaling a team from 6 to 80 in 18 months, or doing the harder thing nobody likes scheduling: scaling it back down with dignity through M&A and RIFFs. "Yes we can" isn't a poster on the wall. It's how the work gets done.

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Core Expertise

Proven track record across multiple dimensions

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Mission-Critical, Highly Regulated

Built for fintech and banking where 1 hour of downtime costs €200k+ and the regulator is watching. Real-time SLAs, compliance, security at scale - shipped, audited, and kept reliably boring (which, in this world, is the highest compliment).

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Global Team Leadership

350+ engineers across 30+ teams, multiple timezones, matrix orgs that look complicated on a slide and somehow still ship. Building teams that aren't just productive - they're durable enough to survive the leadership change that's always coming.

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Startup to Enterprise

CTO and founder experience across multiple startups (VRHab, VirtualFitness, mTargets) plus enterprise-scale leadership at Nordea and Omnipresent. Same person who scaled engineering 6 to 350 has also been the one stuck choosing between two MVP feature cuts at midnight.

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AI-Native Product Delivery

Building with LLMs, multi-model architectures, real-time voice AI, and the full Claude/Anthropic ecosystem. Not "we have a chatbot" - shipped products with AI in the core loop. Same playbook applied to enterprise SDLC: AI in analysis, design, implementation, and testing.

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Hands-On Technical Leadership

Real depth in software architecture, cloud (AWS, Azure), and distributed systems. Still coding after work because (a) AI moves fast and (b) engineers can smell a leader who hasn't opened a terminal in 5 years.

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System Design Audits

Independent reads on architecture, scalability, and the technical decisions that look fine until they don't. What's actually broken, what's about to break, what's fine but expensive. Straight verdicts you can use to defend a budget conversation or kill a roadmap item.

How I Can Help

What I'm hired for - whether the engagement is fractional, advisory, or hands-on delivery.

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Leadership Coaching

For engineering leaders going from "team manager" to "the person the team will follow into a hard quarter." Authority that's earned, not granted by Slack. Clarity in tough conversations. The version of leadership that holds up when the room gets quiet and someone has to make the call.

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Scale Up & Scale Down

Hired to grow a team from 6 to 80+ in under two years. Also hired to do the part nobody volunteers for: 4 RIFFs and an M&A integration, done with dignity and clean comms. Most leaders are good at one direction. The market needs both - especially now.

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Delivery on Time (Yes, Really)

Took payroll accuracy from 84% to 99.5%. Shipped vendor integrations that the org had labelled "impossible" - in one quarter. Strategic foresight is great; what clients actually pay for is the date on the calendar matching the date the thing goes live.

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AI-Native Startup Consulting

Helping founders validate before burning runway, then build with AI in the core loop (not bolted on for the pitch deck). MVP design, go-to-market reality checks, and the unfashionable habit of saying "this idea isn't ready yet" before you spend €50k on it.

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Technical Architecture & Scalability

Mission-critical systems where downtime has a price tag and the regulator is watching. AWS, Azure, real-time pipelines, payment processing, payroll automation - shipped at scale, not whiteboarded for a slide. I'll tell you what to build, what to skip, and what's secretly going to bite you in 18 months.

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Engineering Excellence & SDLC

From "we don't have CI" to "every PR ships in 12 minutes" - the practical version. Pipelines, automation, quality gates, AI integrated across analysis, design, code and test. The goal isn't world-class engineering practices. The goal is shipping more, breaking less, and not waking up at 3am because a deploy went sideways.

Maciej Grabek - AI-Native Builder, Engineering Leader, Operator and Advisor

Operator and Advisor. No Theater.

20+ years engineering. 6+ leading globally distributed teams. ~350 engineers scaled at peak. €19M+ budgets owned. That's the CV version. The honest version is shorter: I'm an engineer who became a leader who never stopped coding - and these days I run AI-native products of my own while advising founders, CEOs and CTOs doing the same. Operator and advisor, both. Just no theater, no fluff, no slide decks pretending to be strategy.

At Nordea I scaled engineering from 6 to 350+ in under 4 years, managed €19M+ annual budgets, and led the things nobody puts on a victory deck: 4 RIFFs and 1 M&A integration, done with dignity and clean comms. At Omnipresent (acquired by Deel), I owned end-to-end payroll automation - took accuracy from 84% to 99.5% - and migrated a TypeScript monolith to Python microservices while shipping vendor integrations the org had labelled "impossible." Inside one quarter.

Off-hours, I ship AI-native products. Avisibli (the GEO play - the SEO of the AI era), ZeroTurb (6,000+ daily searches), Choremon (kids' chores, gamified), plus client work under NDA. I'm not theorizing about AI. I'm wiring it into core loops, fighting Stripe webhooks, and watching prod errors at midnight. Same playbook applied at the day job: AI across analysis, design, implementation, and testing - not bolted on for the keynote.

Microsoft MVP for 5 years running. 4 books. 200+ talks across Europe and the US. 500k+ webcast views on Microsoft Channel 9. The MVP era is past tense - the instinct to ship in public isn't. I write, build, and teach openly because the work compounds, and because AI doesn't lower the bar; it raises it for the people who actually engage with it.

5× Microsoft MVP 4 Published Books AI-Native Builder GEO Builder Fractional CTO Mission-Critical & Regulated

What Clients Say

Real impact from real partnerships

"Maciej's approach to change management transformed how we handle organizational transitions. His ability to balance empathy with decisive action helped us navigate a major restructuring while maintaining team morale and productivity."

Y.

VP, startup

"Working with Maciej was a game-changer for our startup. He helped us validate our MVP assumptions early, saving us months of development time and thousands in budget. His strategic thinking is razor-sharp and always grounded in market reality."

P.

Founder & CEO, e-Commerce

"Maciej's system design audit was exactly what we needed at our growth stage. He identified critical scalability bottlenecks in our payment processing architecture and provided a clear roadmap for improvement. His recommendations helped us redesign our infrastructure before hitting production issues, saving us potentially weeks of downtime and countless engineering hours."

K

Fintech founder

From "Impossible" to Shipped.

Built & Shipping

Avisibli

ZeroTurb

Choremon