Fractional CTO / VP of Engineering
Senior technical leadership before you're ready for a full-time hire.
For founders who need a senior technical leader now, but can't yet justify a full-time CTO salary, or haven't found the right person.
- Signs you need this
- You're a non-technical founder picking stacks, vendors and hires on instinct.
- An agency or contractors build your product, and you can't tell whether their estimates or their code are any good.
- Your first engineers need clear priorities, coding standards and someone senior reviewing their pull requests.
- Investors are asking technical questions, or due diligence is coming, and you'd rather someone else answered.
- What I do
- Strategy. Architecture decisions, build-or-buy calls and a technical roadmap that lines up with your next launch or fundraise.
- Team. Write the job descriptions, run the technical interviews, then onboard and mentor your first engineers.
- Process. Pull-request reviews, CI/CD pipelines that deploy on every merge, a steady release rhythm and blameless incident reviews.
- Spend. Check agency work against what you're paying for, and keep the AWS and LLM bills from creeping up.
- I write production code throughout, so my advice comes from working in your codebase myself.
- You get
- A team that ships on a predictable schedule, architecture decisions written down where your next CTO can find them, and a clean hand-off when you hire full-time. I'll help you find and interview that person too.
- Typical shape
- Monthly retainer covering a set number of days each month.
- Why me
- I've built three engineering teams starting from one engineer, to 6, 10 and 12 people, and I've been a co-founder and CTO twice. Each time I set up how the team planned, reviewed and shipped its work, and I kept writing code the whole way.
Next step
You'll get a straight answer on what to fix first, whether or not we work together.