Step 1
Orient
Understand the business and the stack.
03 - service
Solution Architecture
You have engineers. What you do not have is the senior voice in the room who has shipped this before and can tell you which path is a trap before you walk down it.
Hiring a full-time CTO at this stage is heavy, slow, and expensive. Flying blind on the big calls is more expensive, just later. This is senior technical leadership on a retainer: the judgment without the equity and the payroll.
What you walk away with
A clear technical roadmap your team can actually build against.
The expensive mistakes caught on a whiteboard, not in production.
A senior partner on call for the decisions that are hard to reverse.
How it works
Step 2
Direct
Architecture, roadmap, and hard calls.
Step 3
Stay on call
Retainer support, not a one-off report.
Proof
Architected a multi-service EdTech platform from zero, including its RAG agent.
0 to 1architecture, built and shipped
Technical leadership in a high-stakes domain where errors are not an option.
1surgical-grade vision system
Under the hood
Fractional CTOSystem architectureTechnical strategyRoadmapTechnical due diligenceTeam mentoring
Fractional vs full-time
Fractional, monthly
Full-time equivalent
Questions
Do you write code, or just advise?
Both, as needed. The point is senior judgment. Sometimes that means architecture, sometimes it means getting hands dirty on the hard part.
What does a retainer actually look like?
A set number of days a week or month, scoped to your stage. It flexes as you grow.
Tell me the technical decision keeping you up.
That is a conversation worth having.