Hi, I'm Mark Schaake.
Hands-on technical leadership for complex workflows, reliable software, and practical AI leverage.
I help startups and established companies turn messy business processes into production systems, apply AI where it creates operational value, and make the technical decisions that move high-stakes work forward.
Services
Fractional CTO & Technical Leadership
For teams that need senior technical judgment without full-time executive overhead, I help set direction, evaluate tradeoffs, and keep delivery connected to business outcomes.
- ▸Technical strategy for business-critical product decisions
- ▸Architecture review before expensive rebuilds or pivots
- ▸Engineering mentorship and hiring guidance
- ▸Roadmaps that balance delivery risk with product goals
Applied AI Implementation
I help companies move beyond experiments and chatbot wrappers into AI-enabled workflows that improve real operations. The focus is use cases with defined data, reliability, and adoption paths.
- ▸AI workflow discovery and prioritization
- ▸LLM integrations inside existing systems
- ▸Agentic tools for internal operations
- ▸Guardrails, evaluation, and production rollout planning
Architecture & Delivery Consulting
When software has become hard to change, I help teams find the pressure points, simplify the architecture, and ship safer improvements without losing momentum.
- ▸System architecture and codebase assessment
- ▸Integration and data-flow design
- ▸Delivery plans for migrations or modernization
- ▸Performance, reliability, and security risk review
My Approach
Assess
I analyze your current processes, data infrastructure, and business objectives to identify high-impact opportunities.
Design
I create tailored solutions that align with your specific needs, ensuring practical and achievable implementations.
Implement
I deploy solutions with minimal disruption, provide comprehensive support, and ensure successful adoption across your organization.
Experience That Transfers
I work where business complexity, technical ambiguity, and execution risk overlap. The value is not one résumé line; it is the pattern of turning complicated operations into software that teams can trust.
For roughly a decade, I have built and maintained commercial-lending SaaS in a domain that demands complex workflows, third-party integrations, auditability, and reliability. That experience informs how I evaluate AI, architecture, and delivery choices for other businesses.
Translate business complexity into systems
Model messy workflows, edge cases, approvals, exceptions, and handoffs without losing sight of what users need to get done.
Build and operate long-lived production software
Make technical decisions with production realities in mind: reliability, data integrity, change management, integrations, and support.
Apply AI where it creates operational leverage
Use AI to reduce review time, surface context, assist decisions, and automate internal work where evaluation and human oversight can be built in.
Lead through technical ambiguity
Help teams choose a path, understand tradeoffs, communicate risks, and keep high-stakes work moving when the answer is not obvious.
Current Work
Right now, I'm actively building eforge, an open source agentic build system for planned engineering work: define the goal, hand off implementation, and let eforge run the build, review, validation, and merge loop in the background. It is designed to scale from small one-off projects to large, mature codebases where reliability, traceability, and engineering discipline matter.
Let's Talk
Ready to discuss your project? Book a 30-minute call and let's explore how I can help.