Maximllian Silva

• ● Role & impact: Lead Technical Full-Stack Engineer on a 6‑month contract for Grapple Law, a first‑of‑its‑kind AI employment law service used by ~400 users per day. Co-led a team of 4 developers alongside another senior engineer, driving sprint planning, architecture decisions, recruitment, and university collaboration projects; the product was featured in the Mirror and Observer with client wins reported up to £70,000.

• ● AI & workflows: Led the evolution of Grapple Law's AI architecture from OpenAI Assistants (functions +

threads) to a modern tool‑calling workflow orchestrated in n8n and backed by Payload CMS. Implemented a Payload-based assistant configuration layer enabling per‑assistant LLM model selection and prompt management without code changes, improving reliability, response quality, and iteration speed on legal workflows.

• ● Scalability & cost optimisation: Monitored usage and performance, then tuned our DigitalOcean, CI, and LLM usage (e.g. right‑sizing droplets for South Africa + press traffic, optimising Docker/GitHub Actions builds, and selecting appropriate models/workflows) to handle growth reliably while keeping infrastructure and AI costs under control.

• ● Tasked in a 6-month contracting role as a Shopify, NextJS full-stack engineering role for the OrCollective.com, taking user-centric designs built in Figma, combined with behaviour-driven pointed tickets in an agile workflow, resulted in creating a modern, fully typed, full-stack serverless Shopify-powered e-commerce solution which scales. Combined with Prismic for Headless CMS content, so the OrCollective can create and edit new content, keeping in the Vercel-promoted ecosystem.

• ● Shopify was used in several areas of the project the checkout process, subscription management, billing portal, coupon & discounts, Stripe hooks, checkout expiry hooks and data persistence in Supabase.

• ● Working with a PO, designer and another full-stack engineer, we combined as a solid working team to fulfil brand guidelines and major objectives. Key obstacles overcome were having to deliver epics in tight deadlines and timeframes, so we could roll out new features quickly to customers.

• ● Appointed as a full stack engineer in this role for a fast-moving to join a fast-moving development team that had created a latest nextjs, vercel and contentfulcms new website for a company named Astroscale, whose mission is to pioneer space debris removal from our atmosphere and satellite servicing.

• ● The main full-stack engineer was leaving, and they required a new full-stack engineer to immediately get up to speed with their work and complete the remaining tasks necessary. These tasks included managing the CI/CD pipeline, writing new components in Next using TailwindCSS, ShadUI, and Three.js, and utilising react-three-fibre to load satellite models on a specific page.

• ● Everything underwent high-intensity testing to ensure that elements adhered to the exact guidelines designed in Figma for responsiveness. The main challenge was the react-fibre-page, which most exciting part, which can be found here: NextJS, VueJS, Node.js, TypeScript, ContentfulCMS, GraphQL, React-Three-Fiber, TailwindCSS, Vercel, Jest, Playwright Github Confluence, Clickup