// You deal with me directly
The person you meet is the person doing the work. No layer in between, and no handover to a team you have not met.
Product innovation · architecture · technical leadership
Complexity wrangled, ambiguity structured, assumptions tested, software shipped.
Auxil is the practice of Tim Farland, a principal engineer and hands-on CTO. I turn uncertain ideas and difficult requirements into software a team can understand, operate and trust: new products, rules-heavy systems, prototypes moving into production, and builds that need a clear way forward.
// The approach
How I work.
Software should be clean and correct, fit for purpose and quick enough. I keep process to what the work actually needs, which in most places is less than it has accumulated.
I de-risk by right-sizing architectural patterns to your current and near-future constraints, delivering the complexity required, no more, no less.
I'm Tim Farland, a software architect-engineer and recent startup CTO. Over twenty years I have worked on systems where correctness mattered, across San Francisco, London, Berlin, and New Zealand, in venture-backed startups and large corporate platforms alike. That range is where the balance comes from: getting to market without giving up the structure that keeps a system workable for years.
The through-line is that I stay hands-on. I program daily, which is what keeps the architectural advice connected to what it is actually like to build and run the thing.
For larger engagements I draw on a trusted peer network of senior specialists, so capacity scales without diluting seniority and no project rests on a single pair of hands.
20+ years hands-on
1 platform through acquisition diligence
11 client engagements
// What an engagement looks like
// Advice with code behind it
I program daily, so recommendations come with a worked example rather than a slide. Where an assessment is the deliverable, it usually ships with a fix or two attached.
// Complexity sized to the problem
I fit the architecture to your current and near-future constraints rather than a hypothetical scale, which is usually the cheaper and more flexible answer.
// Your team gets stronger
I work inside the team rather than around it, and I would rather leave behind people who can carry the system than a dependency on me.
Services
01
Greenfield product innovation
An opportunity is worth exploring, but the product and technical shape are not settled yet. I work from ambiguity to a testable proposition, a working vertical slice and an architecture sized for what the evidence supports.
- › Problem framing and technical discovery
- › Feasibility experiments and working prototypes
- › Product architecture and production foundations
- › Evidence and options for the next investment decision
02
Product & platform rescue
A build the business is committed to has stalled, and it is hard to say from the inside what is actually wrong. I assess the architecture, code, delivery and product together, then set out a recovery plan with the risks ranked and the trade-offs made explicit.
- › Architecture & codebase assessment
- › Risk map and prioritised recovery plan
- › A worked fix or two, not just a document
- › Readout for the board or executive team
03
Prototype to production
Something works in a demo and now has to survive real customers, a security review and a procurement process. That gap is mostly security, tenancy, identity, reliability and evaluation. I close it hands-on, alongside your team.
- › Multi-tenancy & tenant data isolation
- › Enterprise identity, SSO & access control
- › Observability and AI evaluation
- › Delivery foundations: environments, pipelines, release
04
Fractional technical leadership
Senior technical direction for organisations that need it a day or two a week rather than as another full-time executive. Architecture, standards, hiring and board-level communication, with time at the keyboard alongside the team.
- › Technology strategy and architecture direction
- › Technical due diligence, buying or being bought
- › Senior hiring and technical assessment
- › Standards, review and capability building
Have a working prototype with a concrete delivery blocker? Auxil also develops tools that run inside your own environment and can adapt them to a supported use case. See the products.
Products
Alongside client work, Auxil builds deployable software for applying complex rules, solving constrained design problems, and launching secure products.
They run inside your own environment, as a container in your cloud account or as source your team holds. Your data stays where it already lives, and there is nothing new for your people to log into.
// What we build
Auxil Foundry
Turns cited legislation into ratified rule packs. They run inside your environment and explain every answer back to the clause.
Auxil Solvers
Turn written requirements into schedules, layouts, allocations or configurations, with independent checks and honest limits.
Auxil Chassis
Accounts, permissions, billing and customer separation, built and tested, delivered in your language.
// Track record
Selected work
// IP acquisition Oct 2025 - Jun 2026
Aether AI platform
As Aether's CTO, took an AI presentation prototype to a secure production platform. Re-architected an AWS-only lambdalith into a cloud-agnostic, hexagonal system with 3-layer tenant isolation, and evolved the generation engine in two areas: from one-shot to iterative document updates, and a new natural-language-to-SQL query engine. After Aether closed, its IP was acquired by Ideally in 2026.
// Enterprise modernization Nov 2023 - Sep 2025
Datacom AI Labs architecture
Designed and built a RAG-backed expert system for an enterprise HR and payroll platform, cross-querying personal, internal organisation, and public NZ legislation knowledge bases to resolve complex questions. It also served as a reference architecture for agentic systems across the wider platform rebuild.
// Selected Historical Engagements (Contract, Advisory & FTE)
Ports of Auckland (eMPX)
Container Ship Passage Planner
One of two senior contractors who brought a mission-critical passage planner in-house from a local agency. Built features and integrations for major customer deployments, and cleared inherited defects. The product was later acquired by Trelleborg.
ReactNodeTypeScriptPWA
Altered State Machine
AI & Gaming Infrastructure
Senior full-stack contractor delivering production features across an ambitious stack connecting AI and gaming.
ReactTypeScriptAWS ServerlessTerraformGraphQL
Aeroqual
IoT SaaS Frontend Modernization
Moved a backend (.NET) team at an air-quality IoT SaaS into modern frontend delivery, pairing hands-on development and stack strategy with a reusable design system that sped up their UI work.
ReactTypeScriptStorybook
Rocos
Robot Telemetry Playback
Solved two architectural and performance bottlenecks blocking high-fidelity, concurrent playback and recording of high-volume live robot telemetry.
AngularTypeScriptIndexedDBRxJS
Devoli
Virtual ISP Platform
Got a stalled, critical project over the line for a virtual ISP, then delivered a system audit and transformation plan to stand up their new in-house software team.
GoPostgreSQLJavaScript
Lokal
Mall Companion App
Took a mall companion app from concept to market quickly, introducing two European agency teams (Estonia and Norway) to React Native.
React NativeTypeScript
Arizto
React Native Code Audit
Audited a React Native app and delivered a prioritized improvement plan with worked, expository code the team could act on.
React Native
Th2 Mighway
Tourism Mobile App
Senior developer on the React Native team, shipping key features in a demanding environment, fixing critical codebase issues, and upskilling the team. Acquired by Camplify.
React Native
Ipso e-care
Video Counselling Platform
Built the bulk of a video counselling platform serving people in war-torn regions, subcontracting to a Berlin studio.
ReactNode.js
AskNicely
CX Feedback Platform
Senior engineer on a customer-experience feedback SaaS, building core admin screens and authoring the custom interpreter modules behind its feedback automation.
VueTypeScriptMySQLAWS
Sprongo
Sports Video Analysis
Senior engineer on a sports video-analysis platform, building custom analytical overlays that drew performance metrics directly onto raw browser video frames.
CanvasSVGStreaming
// Field notes
Technical and product strategy
Click any note to open the full technical briefing.
// System architecture
The Batting Stance: a 3-layer architecture for software products that expect to pivot
Three layers (SaaS chassis, engine, vertical) and two pivot points between them. The strategy that keeps the cost of swinging again bounded, for founders still in the search problem.
// Applied AI & R&D
The Confused Deputy Problem in Agent Systems
Prompt injection is the confused-deputy bug in modern dress. The architectural fix is older than the problem: authority travels with the request, narrowed at every hop, and decided by deterministic policy, not by the model.
// Applied AI & R&D
On Messy Data
The pitch is that AI can shoulder most of the data cleanup, leaving structure as the real problem. The reality is that AI carries one layer of a stack of six, and the rest stays slow, contextual, and human. What AI fixes, what it cannot, and what to build instead.
// Languages & execution
It's OCaml's Time
Quietly, in the background, a language long admired from a distance has been sharpening its blades. OCaml 5 closes the adoption gap with direct-style parallelism and algebraic effects.