Platform Foundations. For Scaling Startups.
Your engineers built the product. Platform is a different craft.
I've raised. I've scaled. I've exited. All before LLMs were a thing.
Companies I've worked with
Platform Engineering Services
What I do for startups standing up their platform layer.
Real Results
With Receipts.
Challenge
No platform team. Quarterly releases. Federal compliance choking every deploy.
550% faster delivery. Zero compliance violations. Developers bootstrapped to operate independently.
Challenge
250M requests/day at ceiling. Five teams across three continents.
Scaled the platform to reliably handle over 2B requests per day across all global regions with zero downtime.
Challenge
Infrastructure costs scaling linearly with traffic growth.
Achieved a massive 33% cost reduction year-over-year despite an 8x traffic growth. COGS remained at -1% YoY.
Different industries. Same engineering layer.
The platform problems at growing startups look familiar to the ones I have solved across these verticals. Throughput, reliability, compliance, hiring. The lessons travel.
How an Engagement Works
No long-term contracts. No minimum commitments. Start with a conversation.
Diagnostic Brief
DiscoveryA focused read of your current platform layer, your team's shape, and where infra is bottlenecking product. I diagnose before I prescribe. No pitch decks. No sales reps.
Sprint Zero
Weeks 1-2I get into your stack, learn the environment, and ship the first production-grade platform improvements alongside your team. By the end, both sides know if the fit is right, and your platform is measurably better.
Embedded Platform Partner
RetainerI work alongside your platform engineer and your CTO. Architecture decisions, design review, vendor selection, hiring loop participation, and shipping the critical path while your team levels up.
Operational Handoff
Phase OutThe objective is exit. By the time your Head of Platform is hired and ramped, the standards are documented, the systems are stable, and your platform team owns the stack outright.
Meet Your
Fractional Head of Platform
Tony Chong
Principal & Fractional Head of Platform
Developer, architect, ops lead, VP, CTO, co-founder. I have been on every side of the problem since 1997.
I scaled infrastructure to 2 billion daily requests at a $750M exit. Raised venture capital and built an engineering team from zero as a co-founder. Rebuilt deployment pipelines at a publicly traded FinTech. Engineered internal platforms at an Alphabet subsidiary.
I join your team the same way any new engineer would. I read the codebase, attend the standups, and earn trust through pull requests, not job titles.
All of that, before LLMs were available like they are today. Imagine how far we can scale together now, and how quickly.
Your team built the product. The platform layer deserves the same care.
Start with a conversation. No pitch decks. No juniors. A focused read on what your platform layer needs as you grow.
Book a consultation
Limited AvailabilitySchedule a free discovery call.
Based in Seattle, WA. Available for US & Remote.
You Hired Me. You Get Me.
Airwave is one person. That is the point. You've hired consultants before: the senior partner did the pitch, a junior wrote the code, and a PM relayed your questions with a 48-hour delay. I don't operate that way.
No Layers
There is no project manager relaying your questions. No junior engineer googling your answers. Every conversation, every line of code, every decision goes through me. Full accountability, zero dilution.
