Product thinking. Engineering execution.

Two-time startup CTO. Author of The First CTO. Fractional engineering leadership for founders making decisions they can't easily reverse.

New Thetis: is your AI-built app ready for real customers?

Companies I've worked with

16+ years embedded with engineering teams in fintech, commerce, hospitality, and developer tooling - as CTO, senior engineer, and technical advisor. From React Native at mytheresa to fintech rails at WorkMade and Clerk - embedded engineering work where shipping matters.

I've been the first CTO twice. Now I help founders make the technical decisions they can't easily reverse - hiring, architecture, due diligence - before one wrong call costs six months.

New playbook

The First CTO. The job nobody explains.

A playbook for the loneliest job in startups. Everything I learned the hard way as a two-time startup CTO - architecture decisions, hiring, managing founders, and surviving yourself.

£12 ebook · £79 Playbook + Toolkit

"It's like Ben is inside my brain, validating my thoughts before the situations even arise."

Phillip Penny, Fractional CTO · Amazon review

"…At WorkMade, we took on massive projects with ambitious timelines, and Ben had the rare ability to turn an idea from concept yesterday to a working build in production today. …Working with Ben felt like having both a strategic visionary and a hands-on builder in one."

Nick Simpson, Founder of WorkMade Nick Simpson
Founder, WorkMade

"Ben intuitively knows where to cut corners for speed and where shortcuts would come back to haunt us."

Chase Croft Chase Croft
Head of Product

From people I've worked with

Founders, engineers and workshop attendees. Flick through the pile, or spread it out on the desk.

1 of

Ben is a fantastic engineer, CTO, and manager. I had the privilege of working as an engineer with Ben for six months and learned an incredible amount. Ben has a keen mind for evaluating and making responsible eng tradeoffs to balance speed with stability and reliability which is invaluable in a startup environment. He also is a very efficient engineer and consistently shipped quality code quickly. During his time at WorkMade, Ben was responsible for spearheading several efforts to make our monitoring and deployment infrastructure more robust while simultaneously writing code to ship new features. As a manager Ben does a great job of mentoring his reports and making time to work with them to answer questions, explain things, and generally improve their skills, but also provide them enough time and space to figure things out on their own. It was a real pleasure to get to work with him and he would be an invaluable member to any eng team.

Anya HargilEngineer, WorkMade

At Mytheresa Ben was paramount in crafting the architectural foundations of a React Native application, while also training and guiding the other engineers. He is a stellar developer, but in my eyes his collaborative and thorough approach make him a real stand-out.

Phillip Bartholdmytheresa

Ben was able to apply his front-end development and architecture experience from day one, helping us come up with and validate key architecture choices and avoid costly mistakes as we scale Kayako to be used by 10,000s organisations worldwide to support millions of end users. We found Ben's advice to be realistic and pragmatic, factoring in resource constraints, business needs of the day and balancing those with future scalability benefits. We are relieved to have had Ben part of our design process - his early contributions have saved a potentially limitless amount of developer time, pain and costs down the line.

Jamie EdwardsCEO, Kayako

I hired Ben to lead the redevelopment of our SaaS application from crusty old code into something more modern. He made suggestions - along with pro's and con's - that helped us decide which way to go. We ultimately went with his recommendations. I quickly came to depend on Ben's knowledge and expertise on all aspects of the development of our Backbone.js app. His wider experience with other aspects of product architecture, such as REST APIs and CSS was also invaluable. Unlike your stereotypical uber-techie, he's also very personable and everyone enjoyed working with him. I've come to regard him as the foremost expert in his field.

Duane JacksonFounder, KashFlow

We worked with Ben on a tricky React-based medical app, where we needed to cover a lot of ground efficiently, with a small team. Ben was a pleasure to work with - fast, effective and a great communicator, delivering on time and delivering exactly as promised. Particularly valuable was his ability to help us implement best practices, sensible technical architecture and a testing framework that helped ensure that code quality remained high even after his involvement on the project ended and the codebase transitioned to being owned and maintained by another team. Wouldn't hesitate to recommend him to others looking for the same!

Jon LayFounder, Hanno

Ben built us responsive front-end framework that minimised maintenance and increased developer efficiency. He was able to quickly understand our needs and provide us with the building blocks we needed to scale our front-end.

Tom AltermanProduct Manager

Organising and running ng-workshop with Ben was a great experience. He is an excellent teacher and more than willing to share his knowledge building and scaling web applications. He covered everything from basic JavaScript concepts to high-level architecture and best practices, and made sure everyone is at the same level by the end of the day. We received very positive feedback from all attendees after the event. I don't think the workshop would have been such a success without Ben.

Svilen Gospodinovng-workshop co-organizer

Ben's Javascript for Beginners workshop was extremely useful. He covered the fundamentals of Javascript in one day and I've come out of it with the knowledge and confidence to write pure Javascript when I code. The workshop was in a small group, so it was easy to chat, and he is very approachable which meant I wasn't afraid to ask questions. The topics were interactive and dynamic and definitely grows your appetite to code and learn more. I'd recommend this workshop for anyone stuck in learning JavaScript.

Pui-Ling LauWorkshop attendee

Track record

Apr 2023 – Nov 2024

WorkMade · CTO

Oversaw the full software development cycle, from team management and hiring to technical architecture and infrastructure. Delivered a secure, automated tax categorization and payment system, supporting business growth and operational excellence.

Nov 2024 – Aug 2025

Clerk · Senior Software Engineer

Key contributor to Clerk’s Commerce platform, leading the design and implementation of core backend billing infrastructure. Enabled rapid product launches and improved cross-team collaboration, exemplifying technical strategy and product development at scale.

Aug 2019 – Feb 2023

Letter · CTO

Architected and built the Letter platform from the ground up, leading a team to deliver features aligned with business needs. Fostered a strong engineering culture and delivered a robust, scalable product.

2015 – Present

ReqRes · Featured Project

Built ReqRes to streamline API and UI testing for developers. The platform now processes over 150 million requests monthly, demonstrating my ability to deliver high-impact, scalable developer tools.

Built & shipped

15+ products shipped since 2014. Some sold, some shut down, all shipped. Here's the back catalogue.

GETreqres.in/api/users/2

200 OK

{ "data": { "id": 2, "email": "janet.weaver@reqres.in", "first_name": "Janet", "last_name": "Weaver" }}

150M+

Monthly API requests

Visit ReqRes

ReqRes - the backend you don't have to build. API, database, auth, and logs from a single URL. Used by developers at companies shipping real products - from solo founders building MVPs to QA teams running test suites against live endpoints.

Talks and podcasts

  1. Coding Chats · Podcast

    I took the CTO title not knowing what I was getting into

    Asking for the title over email, and what happened next.

  2. CTO Confidential · Podcast

    Becoming The First CTO

    What it's actually like being a first-time CTO at a seed-stage startup, with Michael Rispoli.

  3. fintech_devcon · Denver 2025

    Securing a Banking System's UI and API

    Masking IDs, audit trails the compliance team actually loves, and AI tooling inside regulated rails.

  4. fintech_devcon · Denver 2024

    Letting Go of Perfectionism in Distributed Systems

    Chaos theory, fault tolerance, and why Jurassic Park taught us more about distributed systems than we expected.

Field notes

Occasional field notes on engineering leadership, architecture decisions, and the CTO job. No spam, just substance.

Next conversation

Let's connect.

Async-friendly collaboration for founders and teams that need a steady hand on architecture, delivery, and the people shipping it. Reach out and we'll map the quickest path to traction.

hello@benhowdle.im · Response < 24h · UK-based, working BST–EST overlap daily