Senior leadership, on demand
Principal-level architecture and judgement without a £200k+ full-time hire or a 6-month search.
Available · Q3 engagements
Fractional principal engineering for fintech.
Senior technical leadership for trading, risk and capital-markets software — 1–3 days a week, without a full-time hire.
20 years in capital markets. Experience includes PIMCO, S&P Global and JP Morgan.
Career background
PIMCOS&P GlobalJP MorganGamesys
Why a fractional principal
The judgement of a seasoned principal — without the hiring overhead.
Built for regulated, data-heavy software
Real-time trading and risk UIs, AG Grid & TanStack at scale, React/TypeScript performance, AWS-native architecture.
Hands-on where it counts
Code on the hardest 20%; otherwise architecture, the team, and the roadmap.
Services
What you get.
A flexible engagement designed around the way ambitious fintech and asset-management teams actually work — strategic on the big calls, hands-on on the hardest pieces.
Typical engagement
1–3 days / week · ongoing
Remote-first, London-accessible. Outside IR35, company-to-company.
Architecture & technical decisions
System design, technology trade-offs, and the documented rationale your team can refer back to.
Engineering leadership and mentoring
Weekly office hours, code reviews, and mentoring for your senior and mid-level engineers.
Hands-on work on critical, complex pieces
Hardest 20% of the build — performance-critical UI, risk calculation pipelines, complex grid work.
Hiring and team scaling
Job specs, technical interviews, and structured guidance on org design as you grow.
Stakeholder translation
Bridge between business sponsors, compliance, and engineering — keeping everyone aligned.
Selected work
Where I've built and led, in production.
Career background from senior roles in capital markets. Past employers — not endorsing clients.
PIMCOPrincipal Engineer
Next-generation repo trading system
Owned the UI architecture for a live repo trading desk — thousands of real-time positions with sub-second pricing and risk.
Re-platformed the full trade lifecycle — execution, risk, settlement — cutting latency and operational risk for the desk.
ReactTypeScriptAG GridJavaAWS
S&P GlobalPrincipal / Assoc. Director
XVA & BSR risk platform + grid migration at scale
Led architecture and delivery of an enterprise XVA/BSR risk platform sold to major financial institutions.
Rebuilt the risk grid for scale and drove the testing discipline that cut production incidents — helping win and keep enterprise clients.
TanStack GridReactTypeScriptNode.jsPlaywrightAWS
JP MorganVP / Lead
Repo platform migration off legacy Java
Led the modernisation of a business-critical repo platform off legacy Java — without disrupting the live trading desk.
Event-driven rebuild delivering multi-million-pound annual savings and full regulatory compliance.
ReactReduxRxJSAG GridKafkaPython
How to engage
Three ways to work together.
Engagements run company-to-company via AppstackX Ltd (outside IR35). Remote-first, with London-accessible on-site days where useful.
Paid discovery
1–2 days
From £2,000
Written technical assessment + roadmap. Use it to scope a larger engagement or stand-alone.
- 1:1 calls with engineering leads
- Architecture & roadmap review
- Written report with recommendations
Monthly retainer
1–3 days/week, ongoing
From £4,000/ month
Embedded senior technical leadership — the default engagement for ongoing impact.
- Architecture & technical decisions
- Hands-on code on the hardest 20%
- Engineering mentoring & hiring
Fixed project
Defined scope
£6,000–£18,000
Architecture review, migration, or performance audit with a single defined outcome.
- Clear deliverables, fixed price
- Stakeholder workshops
- Implementation plan with owners
About
Khuram Masood.
20-year software engineer specialising in high-performance trading and risk systems.
Principal Engineer at PIMCO. Principal / Associate Director at S&P Global. VP / Lead at JP Morgan. Senior Team Lead at Gamesys. Now helping fintechs and asset managers ship complex software through AppstackX.
Real-time UIs
AG Grid · TanStack · React
Cloud architecture
AWS-native
Regulated systems
FCA · MiFID II
Questions
Frequently asked.
Fractional means you get a senior engineer on a recurring, part-time basis — typically 1–3 days a week — rather than full-time. You pay only for the time you need, with senior-level judgement on the calls that matter.
Let's talk
Thirty minutes, no pitch.
Tell me where you're stuck — I'll tell you honestly whether AppstackX is a fit.