PDM Advisory — Editorial Luxury

Technical decisions, grounded in 25 years of scar tissue.

Fractional CTO, advisory, rescues and hands-on engineering for startups and early-stage teams. I help founders make the calls that shape a product before the code makes them for you.

GPU query engines that went 10,000× faster. Real-time ultrasound simulation. A decade-long mining automation programme reset to shipping MVP. Pragmatic, outcome-focused, technology-agnostic.

Pragmatic. Delivery-focused. Deep where it counts.

I'm Daniel Paull — engineer, architect and technical leader. I've co-founded a MedTech startup, built GPU-accelerated query engines, delivered real-time physics simulation for clinical VR training, and rescued large automation programmes from the brink. I work best at the intersection of deep technical contribution and leadership: shaping strategy while staying close enough to the code to know when the plan and the reality have diverged.

Based in Perth, Western Australia. Work remote or hybrid with teams anywhere.

Four ways I engage.

Fractional CTO

Embedded technical leadership, part-time, founder-grade.

Strategic and operational technical leadership for founders who need the signal of a senior CTO without the cost or dilution of hiring one full-time. Roadmap, architecture, hiring, stakeholder management, investor conversations.

—Technology strategy aligned to commercial reality
—Architecture decisions and technical risk management
—Engineering hiring, team design and early culture
—Board and investor-facing technical communication

Technical Advisory

A senior sounding board on call.

Light-touch strategic partnership for founders and exec teams already in motion. Regular working sessions, roadmap reviews, technical diligence support, or ad-hoc calls on the decisions that matter.

—Monthly or ad-hoc strategic engagement
—Technical diligence for investments or acquisitions
—Roadmap, architecture and hiring review
—Mentoring for founding engineers and early tech leads

Deep Dives

Time-boxed assessments and rescues.

When something is stuck, failing, or quietly expensive — a focused engagement to cut through it. Architectural resets, performance interventions, salvage assessments, and the blunt second opinion that founders rarely get honestly.

—Is this salvageable? — candid technical assessment
—Performance and scalability interventions
—Architecture resets with a delivery plan, not a deck
—Short, intense, high-leverage engagements

Build

Hands-on engineering for problems that need a senior, not a team.

Selective engagements where the right answer is one experienced engineer shipping, not coordinating. GPU and HPC work, real-time systems, distributed platforms, hard algorithmic work, or the quiet kind of green-field where every early decision compounds.

—GPU / HPC / performance-critical systems
—Real-time simulation and physics
—Greenfield technical foundations for new products
—Published-research-to-production translation

Where theory meets the production floor.

Mining — major global operator

10,000× GPU query engine

Real-time interactive queries against a resource model system whose architecture made that fundamentally impossible within the project scope. Led the design of a custom columnar store on a log-structured, layout-conscious data layer, with a GPU query layer running dynamically compiled OpenCL kernels orchestrated across multiple GPUs.

Impact —Baseline cold queries measured in minutes. Final system: cold in under a second, hot in a few milliseconds. Approximately 10,000× faster. Grew and led the team to seven engineers over several years.

Early-stage startup

AI surveillance platform rescue

Two-week technical assessment of a platform stalling under mounting defects. Identified via static analysis a critical latent bug the team had missed. Delivered an architectural roadmap that guided their engineering practice for the following year.

Impact —Short, sharp engagement. Unblocked the product, reset the team's technical trajectory, and produced a plan they executed without me.

MedTech — Vantari VR (co-founder / CTO)

Real-time generative ultrasound simulation

Designed and implemented a physically-based generative ultrasound simulation using GPU ray tracing via NVIDIA OptiX. Dynamically generated clinically plausible ultrasound from anatomical surface models, including reflections, transmission losses, shadowing, enhancement and doppler modes.

Impact —Clinically compelling image fidelity. A primary differentiator in competitive evaluations against animation-heavy incumbents. Part of the core IP that won the platform in hospitals, universities and medical-device OEMs globally.

Mining — major global operator

Mining automation programme reset

Engaged to assess a decade-long, failing automation programme (>100 person-years). Determined the existing stack was unsalvageable, recommended a full architecture and technology reset, scoped a 4–6 person-year MVP delivery plan, assembled the core technical team, and shipped the MVP.

Impact —Transitioned leadership to an in-house team for continued development. A decade of accumulated technical debt replaced with a system that shipped.

How I think about the work.

Performance does matter.

Software performance and design discipline still matter in an age of abundant compute. A 10× improvement in the right place changes what a business can do — not just what it costs.

Decisions under uncertainty.

Novel technical work is risky. Structure the uncertainty: define decision gates, make trade-offs explicit, maximise delivered value even when the answer is unknown.

Bottom-up engineering.

Top-down edicts erode technical value. Ground strategy in fundamentals and the insight that comes from staying close to the work.

Outcomes over spectacle.

Ship training that teaches, systems that scale, decisions that hold up. Impressive demos don't survive contact with real users.

Technical decisions, grounded in 25 years of scar tissue.

Pragmatic. Delivery-focused. Deep where it counts.

Four ways I engage.