09/27/2026 updated
40 % partially available
Full-Stack Engineer & CTO | Web and Native Products | 14 Years Experience
Gillitts, South Africa
Only remote
MComm EconomicsAbout me
Full-stack and mobile developer, 14 years. CTO and co-founder of an EdTech company (70,000+ learners). In 2026 I shipped two React Native apps to both stores on my own. Laravel, Vue, TypeScript, AI pipelines in production. Remote from South Africa (UTC+2), AI-native with Claude Code & Codex
LLMPHPMobile Application DevelopmentLaravelNode.jsTypeScriptReact.jsVue.jsExpo.ioReact Native
Senior full-stack and mobile developer with 14 years of experience. CTO and co-founder of an EdTech company with more than 70,000 learners. I take products from an empty repository to paying users, and I still write the code myself: in 2026 I designed, built, and shipped two React Native and Expo apps on my own, through to the App Store and Google Play.
Mobile: React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Expo Router, EAS Builds and over-the-air updates, offline-first architecture (SQLite, Legend State), Sign in with Apple and Google, RevenueCat subscriptions, Apple Watch companion apps, Sentry and PostHog, and App Store and Play Store submission through review.
Backend: Laravel (10+ years, including Filament, Livewire, Horizon, Reverb WebSockets, multi-tenancy), PHP, Node, Convex, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues and event-driven systems, REST APIs, Stripe and Paystack, Firebase and Supabase.
Frontend: Vue 3, Inertia, React, Tailwind, Astro, Blade, and Alpine.
AI engineering: LLM features running in production, not demos. That includes multi-step generation pipelines with deterministic validation, repair loops, and LLM judges from a second provider; eval suites with golden fixtures and cost caps; embeddings and vector search (Pinecone, Convex); the OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic APIs; and MCP. My workflow is AI-native. Claude Code is my main development environment, with Cursor and Codex alongside it, and I review everything the agents produce before it ships.
Infrastructure: AWS (auto-scaling, rolling deployments), Cloudflare Workers, Docker, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, observability, and written post-mortems.
How I work: Remote from South Africa (UTC+2, the same as CET in winter). I work async with written documentation. I'm used to owning requirements, architecture, build, and release end to end for non-technical founders, and I'm just as comfortable joining an existing team. I bill either a fixed price per milestone or a day rate, invoiced through my US company. English is my native language. I read German well, but I work in English, both spoken and written.
Most recent: Ten months building a paid member app from zero to one (Laravel 12, Filament v4) for a US client. Reference available on request. Portfolio and writing at chrismuller.me.
Experience
Professional experience10+ years
Freelancer since2025
Languages
EnglishNative speakerSpanishGood
Project history
US entity behind Kronos Studio and the vehicle for US contract work. Designed, built and launched Kronos Studio, a consumer subscription fitness app, alone on React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Convex, RevenueCat, Sentry and PostHog with an Apple Watch companion in nine languages. Workouts are generated server-side through a multi-step LLM pipeline with vector retrieval, a designer call, deterministic certification, a repair ladder and a cross-vendor judge. Also built getkronos.app as an Astro site in nine languages on Cloudflare Workers with a self-correcting translation pipeline.
Co-founded and led product and engineering for an edtech platform serving 70,000+ South African high school learners. Built and maintained a custom LMS (Campus) in Laravel, Vue, Inertia, MySQL, Redis, Horizon and Reverb websockets on an auto-scaling AWS fleet. Shipped an offline-first React Native and Expo app solo to iOS and Android in March 2026. Integrated AI features including semantic search, embeddings with Pinecone, question and explanation generation, and an LLM review pipeline. Responsible for discovery, scoping, design, launch, hiring and AI agent governance.
Zero-to-one build of Kidlist Deluxe, the paid member app for a Chicago family-activities guide, for a non-technical founder. Built with Laravel 12, Filament v4, Livewire, Tailwind, Horizon and Pest. Delivered a premium subscription tier, events engine, an API feeding the public WordPress site, and migration of years of existing content. Owned requirements, estimates, architecture, build and deploys over a 10-month engagement.