Who this is for
Most companies that call me are not short of engineers. They are short of someone who can sit with the CEO in the morning, review a pull request in the afternoon and explain the trade-off to the board the next day. That is the job of a CTO, and plenty of businesses need it long before they can justify, or attract, a full-time one.
You are probably a good fit if any of these sound familiar:
- You are a non-technical founder and every technical decision feels like a bet you cannot check.
- Your engineering lead is excellent at shipping but has never set a multi-year technical strategy or reported to a board.
- You have an AI initiative that impressed in a demo and has stalled since.
- Investors are asking about scalability, security or AI, and the honest answers are vague.
- Your last CTO left and you need steady leadership while you find the right replacement.
If you are still deciding whether you need this at all, I wrote a longer piece on when you actually need a fractional CTO.
The problems I solve
Decisions that are expensive to reverse
Choice of cloud, data model, build versus buy, which AI vendor to commit to. These decisions set your cost base and your speed for years. I make sure they are made deliberately, written down and tied to business outcomes rather than whatever was trendy that quarter.
A team that has outgrown its structure
Ten engineers can coordinate over coffee. Forty cannot. I design team topology, ownership boundaries and the engineering practices (reviews, decision records, on-call) that let more people ship without stepping on each other.
AI ambition without a plan
I help you pick the AI use cases that pay for themselves, ground them in your own data, and put evaluation and cost controls in place before you scale. My AI architecture work covers the detail.
Technology the board cannot see into
I translate engineering reality into the language of risk, cost and timeline, so your board and investors get honest, useful reporting instead of reassurance.
How I approach a fractional CTO engagement
- Listen first. In the first two weeks I talk to founders, engineers, product and key customers, and read the code and the cloud bill. Opinions come later.
- Write the current state down. A short, candid assessment of architecture, team, delivery and risk. Most teams have never seen their situation on one page.
- Agree a technical strategy. A roadmap tied to business milestones, with the few decisions that matter most called out and owned.
- Set up the operating rhythm. Architecture decision records, planning, metrics and a light governance process the team actually uses.
- Hire and grow people. I help define roles, interview senior candidates and mentor the engineers who will lead after me.
- Hand over cleanly. The goal is a team that runs without me, or a permanent CTO who inherits a clear picture rather than a mess.
What you get
| Deliverable | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Technical assessment | An honest view of architecture, team, security and delivery risk, in plain language. |
| Technology strategy and roadmap | Priorities tied to revenue, cost and fundraising milestones. |
| Architecture decision records | A written trail of why things were built the way they were. |
| Hiring plan and role definitions | The right senior hires, in the right order, with a clear bar. |
| Board and investor reporting | Technology risk and progress your board can act on. |
| Due diligence readiness | Answers ready before an investor asks. See technical due diligence. |
How an engagement runs
We start with a free 30-minute call to see whether there is a fit. If there is, most clients begin with a two to four week architecture and AI readiness review. It produces a written assessment and a prioritised roadmap, and it is useful whether or not we continue.
From there, the fractional CTO role usually runs at one to two days a week, with a regular cadence: a weekly session with the leadership team, time embedded with engineering, and a monthly written update. The commitment flexes up around fundraises, launches and senior hires, and down once the team is running well.
Not sure where to start? Run the two-minute challenge analyser and bring the result to the intro call.
Fractional, interim or full-time?
| Option | Best when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional CTO | You need senior judgement now, but not five days a week | Needs a strong engineering lead day to day |
| Interim CTO | A full-time seat is empty and must be covered for a defined period | Higher cost; focus can drift to firefighting |
| Full-time CTO | Technology is the business and the scale justifies it | Slow and expensive to hire, costly to get wrong |
Many of my clients use a fractional engagement to bridge the gap: getting the strategy and team right first, then hiring a permanent CTO who walks into a clear plan.
Relevant experience
I am a principal engineer by background, and I still build. That matters, because a CTO who cannot read the code ends up managing by rumour.
- I have designed and scaled event-driven systems handling more than a million transactions a day.
- I have built an AI platform on Kubernetes end to end, from product to infrastructure. I have made the founder trade-offs you are making now.
- I work across the stack, from ontology and knowledge graph design to Terraform on AWS, Azure and GCP.
- I bring domain depth in healthcare data, including OMOP CDM and OHDSI, and co-authored peer-reviewed research in Science Immunology.
- I am a MongoDB Community Leader and spend time mentoring engineers in public.
I am based in the United States and the UAE and work with teams in both time zones. If you are in the Gulf, see fractional CTO in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. You can also read case studies describing the kinds of problems I am brought in to solve.