I help companies make sense of AI and software — and ship the result.
I’m Mike Esser, a software developer and AI expert based in Bonn. I work with German Mittelstand companies who want a senior engineering voice in the room — and a working system at the end of it.
Five things I get hired for.
I work hourly. Every engagement starts with a call and a written outline of what we’re actually doing — no retainer commitments, no surprise scope.
Bringing language models into real products: retrieval, evals, cost & latency, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes them survive Monday morning.
Workflows that finally do themselves. Internal tooling, document pipelines, integrations between the seven systems your team copy-pastes between today.
Building the thing you can’t buy off-the-shelf — backends, internal apps, data pipelines. Pragmatic stacks, written to last.
A senior pair of eyes on a system before it gets too expensive to change. AWS, Google Cloud, monolith vs. service split, build vs. buy.
A one-day workshop for leadership teams: what AI can realistically do for your business in the next twelve months, and what it can’t.
Four steps. No magic.
A predictable sequence — calibrated for hourly work where every hour should produce something you can point at.
A 30-minute call
You describe the problem in your own words. I ask questions. By the end of the call we both know whether this is a fit, and what the first concrete piece of work would be.
A written outline
Before any hours get billed, you get a one-pager: what we’re doing, what success looks like, what I’ll need from your team, and a rough hour estimate. You sign off.
The actual work
I work in your codebase, on your infrastructure, in short visible increments. Weekly written updates. You can stop at any point, no notice period.
A handover
When the work is done it leaves with documentation, runbooks, and a recorded walkthrough. Your team owns it. I’m available afterwards on the same hourly basis if something breaks.
Twelve years writing software, the last four shipping AI features.
I’m a software developer and AI expert from Bonn. I run Mike Esser Trading & Consulting as a one-person practice — which means the person you talk to on the call is the person who writes the code.
My clients are mostly German Mittelstand and EU companies between five and a hundred people. The common thread: a real production system, a real problem, and a leadership team that wants senior engineering judgement without committing to a full-time hire.
I work with LLMs, Python, Laravel, Java, and PHP — across AWS and Google Cloud. I've been writing software since 2014 and shipping AI in production since the first wave of useful LLMs.
Tell me what’s stuck.
A 30-minute call costs nothing and usually clarifies more than two weeks of internal meetings. Worst case, I tell you it’s not a fit and point you somewhere better.