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 in Laravel, Python, Java, PHP, and across AWS and Google Cloud. I’ve been writing software since 2014 and shipping AI features 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.