I ship products, not prototypes
I'm Victor — a product engineer. I take founders from an idea to a live product: I talk to your users, decide what's worth building, write the code (with AI doing much of the typing), wire up payments, and run the infrastructure it ships on. Twenty years of engineering is what keeps it standing after launch.
Tell me what you're building →
Two decades building for Belgian Rail (2M+ daily users), Brother International, Microsoft and Swiss enterprises — now building and running a portfolio of my own products, live and paying their way.
What I've shipped
Not a wall of client logos — products I designed, built, and still operate. Judge me on these.
plain — open-source Git-native CMS
I wanted a CMS with no database, no server, and no hosting bill — just Markdown files in Git. So I built one in a weekend with an AI agent, then moved victorantos.com and angjobs.com onto it. Its own site runs on it. Vanilla JavaScript, one dependency, small enough to read in an afternoon.
Open source · runs free on static hosting · works with JavaScript off · this page is served by it
career.* — six job boards, run by AI agents
One codebase, six live niche job boards — coffee, solar, tech, dental, church — plus a self-serve product to spin up more. A Python agent system I built on the Claude Agent SDK discovers companies and extracts listings across every vertical. That's a production AI system, not a demo — the hard 90% nobody sees.
2.38M companies indexed · 36K+ live listings · Stripe billing per site
NestClaw — private AI agents, cost-engineered
Private AI agents on dedicated hardware, with smart context-trimming that cuts token spend by about half. Because I pay the API invoice for every user myself, context engineering isn't a buzzword here — it's the margin between profit and loss.
~50% lower token spend · live subscriptions on Stripe · built and run solo
Also live and paying their own way: Sneos — one prompt, three AIs side by side — and a dozen more.
Open source, actually used
No client testimonials yet — but my code is public, and other developers chose to star it.
Everyone can generate code now. The scarce thing is shipping software that survives contact with production — and knowing what's worth building in the first place. That's the part I own.
How I can help
Pick the shape that fits. In all of them you get working software you own and can maintain — not a prototype nobody can touch.
Idea → shipped MVP
You have an idea and need it real. I take it from problem to a deployed product — talking to your users, cutting scope to what matters, and shipping something people can actually use in weeks, not quarters.
The features your roadmap is stuck on
Your team is underwater and the backlog isn't moving. I drop in and ship the things that have been waiting — end to end, in production, without adding management overhead.
Production AI features that hold up
Agents, LLM integrations, RAG — built cost-aware and reviewed, not demo-ware that falls over on the second user. I run several AI products of my own; I've paid the bills and fixed the failure modes.
Rescue and harden
A prototype — or a vibe-coded weekend project — that needs to become something you can trust. I take fragile code and make it survive production: reviewed, tested, documented.
Fractional product engineer
Not a full-time hire, but you want one senior person who owns a slice end to end. I embed part-time and ship — the way I've done for enterprises and my own products for twenty years.
How we'd work together
- A no-obligation call. You tell me what you're building. I tell you straight whether I'm the right person and how I'd approach it — no pitch.
- We agree the first outcome. One clear, shipped result to aim at, scoped up front. Fixed scope per sprint; a change is a quick conversation, not a surprise invoice.
- I build in weekly sprints. Working software in production every week — reviewed and understood, not a status deck. You see progress you can actually use.
- You own all of it. Your repository, your infrastructure, documented for handoff. No lock-in and no bus-factor of one — bring on a team later and everything's ready for them.
Working with me
Hiring one person is a risk. Here's how I lower it:
- Simple contracts you can end at any point — no long lock-in.
- Happy for you to bring in another engineer to sanity-check my work, any time.
- Everything I write is yours: your repo, reviewed and documented. If we stop, you keep it all.
- If we talk and it's not a fit, there's no hard sell — we've made a good connection either way.
Common questions
What does it cost?
Senior engineers at my level bill roughly CHF 1,500–2,000 a day in Switzerland. I work in bounded weekly sprints and fixed-scope projects rather than by the hour, so you're buying a shipped outcome, not a timesheet. Exact scope and price come out of a short discovery call — and if your budget is real but tight, say so; I'd rather scope to it than pad it.
How fast can you really ship?
Most MVPs are weeks, not quarters. AI does much of the typing; twenty years of judgment decides what to build and catches the code that looks right but isn't. The speed comes from cutting scope well, not from cutting corners.
You build with AI — is it maintainable?
Yes. AI writes a lot of the code; I review, test, and understand all of it, and it ships as software built to last, not a prototype nobody can touch. If an LLM typed it but a senior engineer owns it, that's not vibe coding — it's just how good software gets built now.
Can you work in my stack?
.NET, TypeScript/React, Python, Node, SQL Server/Postgres/SQLite — on your cloud or mine. Agents removed most of the cost of switching stacks, so I pick what fits the job rather than what I happen to know.
Remote, or on-site?
Remote-first, based in Switzerland (CET). I cover a full European day and a good slice of US hours, and I've collaborated remotely for over a decade. On-site for a kickoff is possible in Europe.
What if it isn't working out?
End the contract whenever you like and keep everything, documented. Bring in a third party to check my work any time. The whole arrangement is built to be low-risk for you.
Building something? Tell me about it.
If you've got a product to ship and you want it done properly — fast, and built to last — I'd like to hear what you're working on.