I help technology companies design and run pay structures that hold up when the hard cases arrive — the staff engineer who no longer codes, the role that keeps absorbing others, the equity that's only ever been worth something on paper — without the cost of a full-time total rewards leader.
Most pay frameworks are written around how work used to be organized. The harder problem is building one that survives as the work keeps rearranging itself.
These were once the exceptions. More and more, they're the norm — and rules that can't keep up get quietly abandoned. Back to deciding pay one argument at a time.
I work with leadership teams to build cash and equity structures that are defensible to a board, legible to the people they cover, and durable enough to survive the next reorg. Enough rigor to hold up under scrutiny; not so much overhead that you're standing up a function you don't yet need.
Most frameworks can't answer that. The ones I build are made to.
I work with founders & CEOs, CFOs, heads of people, and the VC firms backing them — usually at the moment informal pay decisions start to compound.
The roles that drive technology companies are being reinvented faster than pay structures can keep up. The staff engineer whose value no longer matches their title. The product role absorbing three jobs that used to have their own ladders. A structure built only for today's chart is already behind.
I've built and run these structures inside venture-backed and founder-led companies at the growth stages where informal pay decisions start to compound — and where the wrong structure gets expensive to unwind.