The engineer you get
DBHQ is Daniel Grimes. When you hire DBHQ, you get me - 26 years of building software where it had to work, now applied with AI at a pace that was not possible three years ago.
Who is Daniel Grimes?
Strip away the sectors and the titles and the work is always the same - find what a stuck business actually needs, then build it, usually somewhere getting it wrong is expensive. First engineer on a defence programme. Design authority on a £1B regulated banking platform. Sole architect behind a national digital identity infrastructure - across defence, banking, insurance, energy, commodities, healthcare and identity.
For the last year or so I have pointed that same instinct at modern AI - running what amounts to a team of AI: it does the heavy lifting and never sleeps; I decide what to ask, what to build and what ships.
How I work
Remote-first from the UK, on-site when it counts. I price on the outcome wherever I can, and on a clear day rate where that fits better - either way you know the cost before we start. No juniors, no hand-offs, no forty-page decks: a working system and a clean handover.
You can engage me two ways: to build a specific thing - a fixed-price Blueprint, then a Sprint - or as a fractional engineering lead, owning the technology for a team that has no senior engineering leadership of its own. Same person either way.
Recommendations
What do I actually do?
Real problems rarely sit in a single discipline. The five I work across:
Full-stack engineering
Architect, software engineer, database engineer and DevOps engineer. One person, the whole stack.
Integration and automation
Connecting the systems that do not talk: CRMs, finance stacks, databases, SaaS estates, legacy applications. The unglamorous work where the value is.
Cloud architecture
Azure end to end: landing zones, networking, security, cost. Platforms from zero, and rescues of platforms that grew without a plan.
AI delivery
Getting AI out of the pilot and into production: LLM platforms, retrieval and recommendation systems, agentic workflows, and the guardrails that make them safe to run.
Regulated-grade delivery
FCA, SOX and defence-grade practices, applied in proportion at commercial pace.
Fifteen minutes will tell you if this fits
Bring the problem - the stalled pilot, the systems that do not talk, the manual process eating your team. You will get a straight answer on whether it is sprint-shaped, roughly what it would cost, and when it could be running.
I reply within 24 hours