Nirlep Adhikari

I was CTO of LoanOptions.ai, Australia’s first AI-powered loan comparison and broking platform. I joined when the engineering team was small and the product was early, and I led it through the work that turns an idea into a system a regulated business can actually run on: the platform architecture, the AI matching and decisioning layer, the engineering and DevOps function, and the security and compliance posture behind sensitive financial data. During that time the platform was named FBAA Industry Supplier of the Year and recognised on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50.

There I built the AWS infrastructure myself, including the serverless architecture, the infrastructure as code in CDK and the CI/CD practice the engineering team worked in. I still build in my own time, so when I review architecture or code I know what I’m looking at. On client projects my team writes the code and I own the decisions that matter.

I started Mount Mindforce because I kept meeting founders being sold technology they did not need, hiring engineers who could not deliver, and taking advice from people who had never built or operated anything in production. There is a wide gap between what most technology advisors recommend and what holds up inside a working business. Closing that gap is the entire job.

Today I work as a fractional CTO and enterprise architect with a small number of clients at a time, mostly in finance, lending, insolvency, and professional services. I take on work outside those areas when the problem is real and the founder is serious about solving it. I am based in Sydney. I also run an offshore engineering team of 10 to 15 people, including its own CTO, and direct the developers and technology vendors of the businesses I work with, so one person is accountable for how it all fits together.