About

Frank Shotwell

Frank Shotwell

My career has a repeating pattern: I show up when a team needs to cross a technology chasm, and I help get to the other side.

  • Analog (vinyl and video) to digital media workflows as lead developer at Sonic Foundry and Sony
  • Bare metal to cloud-native infrastructure as director of engineering at Demand Media / Leaf Group
  • Custom monitoring scripts to a unified telemetry platform as director of engineering at Verizon / EdgeCast
  • Using Kubernetes for private cloud and airgap deployments as director of engineering at Replicated
  • Gaming / mobile / social media startup pivoting into and out of crypto as head of engineering at FreshCut
  • Traditional development to AI-native engineering as founder and principal consultant at Crux Capacity

Over the past year I’ve taken my own development practice to what Dan Shapiro calls Level 4: I write specs and manage AI agents, with compounding improvements in agent automation on each iteration. I’ve been hands-on, pushing Claude Code hard for the past year, and am excited to share what I’ve learned.

What I’ve been doing lately

I do fractional engineering for startups. I join your team 15 to 50 hours a month, get into your codebase, and ship.

For a security startup, I built AWS infrastructure from scratch, wrote Terraform modules where nothing was automated before, and set up Claude Code workflows so the CEO and head of threat intelligence could contribute across the stack. That 1-person fractional engagement became a 3-person engineering team.

For an AI startup, I migrated their entire infrastructure from manually-configured AWS to Pulumi, aligned to AWS Well-Architected standards. I built agent tooling so their devops and product engineers could propose and ship infrastructure changes through code review.

The network

Over 20 years I’ve built a network of engineers who keep coming back to work together. I maintain a curated bench of senior people I trust across backend, infrastructure, mobile, and AI/ML. When a project needs more than one person, I staff a team from that bench and lead the engagement. The engineers I’ve managed and coached have gone on to Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Airbnb, Riot Games, and successful startups of their own. Several of them are on my bench today. I care about that track record more than anything on my resume.