Consulting with me
I take short engagements on complex cross-domain technical problems other people have been unable to solve. The work calls for tenacity as much as technical depth, and the problems I get called into have usually had multiple people attempt them already. What I bring is a methodical approach and a wide enough background across IT, networking, infrastructure, and current production AI to see the connections between domains that single-specialist consultants miss.
Solving these kinds of problems has been a thread through my career. When I worked for a cloud service provider in London, I landed a major client by introducing technology nobody else had used in that combination, against direct opposition from the CTO who told me it would cost me my job if it failed. It did not fail. When I moved to Perth, I was hired to architect and build redundant private data centres and networks for an ICT service provider's new flagship client, on the strength of my MPLS, BGP, and OSPF work. The full story of how I got here is on my about page.
The kind of work
The intermittent issue that impacts your business or your clients, where the symptoms are clear but the cause is elusive. The integration that keeps failing despite repeated attempts to fix it. The production problem nobody has been able to root-cause. The system that worked yesterday and does not work today, where the change log and the symptoms do not appear to be connected.
Often the problem spans domains: a network issue that looks like an application bug, an authentication failure that traces back to a certificate, a database slowdown that resolves to a switch misconfiguration two racks away. The reason these problems resist single-specialist consultants is that the answer lives in the gaps between specialisations, where each expert can credibly say "that is not my domain."
A recent example: a healthcare practice had been dealing with recurring IT issues for months that their support provider could not resolve. I spent time on site, talked to the staff, watched how they worked, and built a map of what was actually going wrong. What had been reported as a single problem turned out to have multiple underlying causes spanning infrastructure, security, and daily workflow. I delivered a detailed recommendations report within a week, mapping each finding to risk level, impact, implementation steps, and relevant Australian healthcare compliance requirements.
How I work
I take engagements on a day-rate basis, scoped tightly to the specific problem you have. I am not interested in interim leadership, general advisory work, or greenfield projects. I am interested in the hard problem that has resisted previous attempts.
A typical engagement starts with a call to scope the problem. We work out together whether your situation actually needs what I do, or whether you would be better served by a different kind of help. If it is the right fit, I will give you a day estimate and we agree the engagement before any billable work starts.
I work remotely from Perth. Most engagements run between half a day and a few days. Some need a follow-up. I write up what I found, what I did, and what would need to change for the problem not to recur. The deliverable is the fix and the explanation, not a slide deck.
What I work with
IP networking and routing, firewall and security architecture, Linux system administration, Kubernetes, GitOps, identity and access management, on-premises infrastructure, hybrid cloud, production AI deployment including local LLMs, and the integration points where each of these meets the others. I built and operated an air-gapped AI platform on clustered GPUs for a large mining group before leaving corporate, and I still run production AI workloads on my own infrastructure today.
AI for Everyone, a day-long interactive course I designed and ran. Three deliveries across two in-person sessions and one online.
Who this is for
You are responsible for a system, service, or product, and a problem inside it has resisted the team's best attempts. You have done what you can. You have brought in vendors or specialists who pointed at someone else's domain. You are now looking for someone who will stay with the problem long enough to find the answer and who can talk to your network team, your security team, your application team, and your platform team in their own language.
You do not need a strategic consultant or an advisor. You need someone who will sit with the data, the logs, the configs, and the team, and not stop until the thing is understood.
Get in touch
The first step is a call to scope the problem.
Or message me on LinkedIn: Andrew Reid.