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Fractional CTOArchitecture ReviewEngineering Process Design

Your Engineering Team Just Asked for Direction. Who Answers?

If you're a founder watching sprints drift and vendors multiply, you need someone who's built this before -- without the $280k salary.

Architecture reviews, hiring oversight, vendor selection, and engineering process design -- delivered by a senior technologist who's actually embedded in your team, with real monthly accountability.

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72+
Engagements
Across SaaS, agencies, and startups
3.2x
Avg Dev Velocity Gain
Within 90 days
$380K
Avg Saved vs Full-Time CTO
Annual cost difference
100%
Monthly Accountability
Deliverables, not hours
What Are Outsourced CTO Services?

A fractional CTO gets you senior technical leadership without carrying a full-time executive salary. They work directly inside your organization -- owning architecture decisions, evaluating and hiring engineers, selecting vendors and tools, running security audits, and building the engineering processes your team actually needs. Engagements are structured around monthly deliverables and accountability milestones. No billable hours, no padding.

Your Current Site May Be a Liability

Common gaps we find in nearly every audit.

You're a non-technical founder making technical decisions based on whatever your contractors tell you
Risk: That's a problem. Misaligned architecture choices quietly compound until you're staring down a six-figure rewrite 18 months later.
Your dev team ships features, but nobody actually owns system architecture or technical debt
Risk: Performance starts slipping. Onboarding new engineers takes forever. Your best senior developers get frustrated and leave.
You've hired three agencies and you still can't tell who's doing good work
Risk: Vendor spend keeps climbing with no quality benchmark in sight. You're essentially buying confidence, not outcomes.
Security and compliance get handed off to the same developers writing features
Risk: One breach or failed audit can cost more than years of CTO compensation -- and it usually comes out of nowhere.
Engineering hiring feels like a black box when you can't evaluate technical candidates yourself
Risk: Bad hires cost $50K–$150K each once you factor in recruiting, onboarding, and eventual replacement.
Nobody's accountable for engineering KPIs -- deploy frequency, incident response, uptime
Risk: Without measurement, engineering stops being a competitive advantage and turns into a cost center.

What Your Website Could Look Like

Custom-designed for your industry. No templates. No stock photos.

AI-generated motion preview

How We Build This Right

Every safeguard, built in from Day 1.

Architecture Review & Roadmap

We audit your stack, infrastructure, and codebase. What you get back is a prioritized technical roadmap with cost estimates and risk assessments attached to every decision.

Engineering Hiring Oversight

We design technical interview processes, evaluate candidates, and sit in on final rounds. You'll stop guessing whether someone is actually senior-level.

Vendor & Tool Selection

We evaluate agencies, contractors, SaaS tools, and infrastructure providers against what you actually need -- not what sounds good. Every recommendation includes a switching-cost analysis so you know what you're committing to.

Security & Compliance Audit

We run penetration testing reviews, dependency audits, and access control assessments. Deliverables map directly to SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR requirements depending on what you need.

Engineering Process Design

We implement CI/CD pipelines, code review standards, sprint ceremonies, and incident response workflows. Your team ships faster and hits production with fewer fires.

Monthly Accountability Reports

Every month you get a written report -- progress against OKRs, engineering health metrics, and the upcoming decisions that actually need your attention as a founder.

What We Build

Purpose-built features for your industry.

Embedded Weekly Cadence

Dedicated hours each week with your team: standups, architecture sessions, and 1:1s with your lead developers.

Board & Investor Readiness

Technical due diligence documentation and architecture narratives ready for fundraising or acquisition conversations.

Tech Debt Quantification

We score and prioritize technical debt so you can budget remediation against feature development instead of just hoping it resolves itself.

On-Call Escalation Access

Critical production incidents or time-sensitive vendor decisions get a same-day response, outside the regular cadence.

Team Topology Design

We define roles, reporting lines, and team boundaries so your engineering org can actually scale without turning into a communication bottleneck.

Build vs. Buy Analysis

For every major feature or system decision, we deliver a written analysis comparing custom development against existing solutions. No opinions without evidence.

Built on a Modern, Secure Stack

Next.jsSupabaseVercelAWSGitHub ActionsTerraformLinearDatadog

Our Development Process

From discovery to launch. Quality at every step.

01

Discovery & Audit

Week 1

We review your codebase, infrastructure, team structure, vendor contracts, and business goals. You get a written technical assessment within the first week -- not the first month.

02

Roadmap & Prioritization

Week 2

We build a 90-day technical roadmap tied to business outcomes. Every item has a cost estimate, an owner, and a risk score.

03

Embed & Execute

Weeks 3–4

We join your weekly cadence -- standups, planning, retros. Hiring, architecture, and process improvements start moving immediately, not after a lengthy onboarding period.

04

Monthly Review Cycle

Monthly

Each month closes with a written accountability report. We review engineering KPIs, adjust the roadmap, and flag the decisions that need your input before they become problems.

05

Transition or Retain

Ongoing

When you're ready to hire a full-time CTO, we write the job description, vet the candidates, and run a structured handoff. Or we stay on retainer. Your call.

Social Animal

Ready to discuss your your engineering team just asked for direction. who answers? project?

Get a free quote

Fractional CTO from $5,000/mo

Fixed monthly retainer. No hourly billing. Cancel anytime after 90 days. See all packages →

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Frequently Asked Questions

A technical advisor gives opinions. A fractional CTO owns outcomes. We're in your standups, reviewing pull requests, interviewing candidates, writing architecture documents. We're embedded in your operations with monthly accountability deliverables — not sitting on a quarterly advisory board offering high-level guidance from a safe distance.
Typical engagements run 10 to 25 hours per week depending on scope. But we price on deliverables, not hours. You're paying for architecture decisions, hiring outcomes, and engineering velocity improvements — not for someone to occupy a seat at your standup.
Yes, and we actually encourage it when the timing is right. We write the job description, design the technical interview loop, evaluate final candidates, and run a structured 30-day knowledge transfer. Most clients transition to a full-time CTO somewhere between 6 and 12 months into the engagement.
This comes up a lot. A VP of Engineering manages people and process execution. A CTO owns technical strategy, architecture, and external vendor decisions. The two roles complement each other well — but they're not the same job. We define clear boundaries on day one so there's no overlap or confusion.
Our deepest expertise is in modern JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystems — Next.js, React, Node.js, Supabase, AWS, and Vercel. We also evaluate and advise on Python, Ruby, Go, and mobile stacks. For specialized domains, we pull in vetted specialists from our network rather than pretending to know everything.
Most engagements kick off within one week of contract signing. The first deliverable — a written technical assessment of your stack, team, and processes — lands by end of week one. Founders need answers now, not next quarter, and that's how we structure everything.
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