Fractional CTO

Senior technical leadership, without the full-time cost

You’ve built an engineering team. They’re capable. But somewhere along the way, the technical decisions have started to pile up, the architecture has drifted, and the team is spending more time fighting fires than building product. Or perhaps you’re scaling fast and the team needs someone who’s done this before.

A fractional CTO gives you experienced technical leadership — the kind that typically costs €200K+ per year as a full-time hire — on a part-time basis that fits your current stage.

What makes a Fractional CTO useful

You have engineers, but no technical strategy. Your team is executing well on tickets, but nobody owns the technical direction. There’s no architectural vision, no deliberate decision-making about the platform, and technical debt is growing faster than it’s being managed.

You’re scaling and things are breaking. The architecture that worked fine at 10,000 users starts to strain at 100,000. Your deployment process that used to take 20 minutes now takes 2 hours. The database is becoming a bottleneck. You know something needs to change, but nobody has the bandwidth or the experience to drive it.

You’re making irreversible technical decisions without enough experience in the room. Choosing the wrong database, the wrong architecture pattern, or the wrong cloud provider can cost years of engineering time to fix. Having a senior technical voice in those decisions changes outcomes.

You need to build an engineering organisation. Hiring senior engineers, setting up engineering processes, establishing code quality standards, creating a culture of technical excellence — these are skills that need to be deliberately developed.

What I bring

I’ve worked across the full engineering stack — from backend systems and distributed architectures to cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and AI engineering. I’ve operated in environments where reliability and scalability are existential concerns, not nice-to-haves.

As a Fractional CTO I work closely with founders and product leadership to align technical and business strategy, while staying close enough to the engineering team to understand what’s actually happening in the codebase.

Technical strategy and architecture

Clear thinking about where your technology platform needs to be in 12–18 months, and a realistic plan for getting there. Architecture decisions that the team can actually execute on, not aspirational diagrams that never connect to real code.

Engineering organisation

Hiring well is hard. Structuring teams for effective delivery is harder. I help design engineering organisations that scale, create hiring processes that identify strong engineers, and establish practices that let teams move fast without accumulating crippling debt.

AI strategy

Most companies are trying to figure out where AI fits in their product and operations. I help cut through the hype to identify where AI can genuinely deliver value — and what it actually takes to build and deploy AI systems that work reliably in production.

Technical due diligence

For investors and acquirers who need an independent assessment of a company’s technical assets, liabilities, and team. Clear, honest, actionable.

Typical engagement

A fractional arrangement usually starts with 1–2 days per week. That’s enough to have meaningful impact on architectural direction, participate in key decisions, and keep close enough to the team to catch problems early. The time commitment scales with what your situation requires.

Engagements typically run for 3–6 months minimum to allow enough time to make a real difference, though many continue longer as a steady technical advisory relationship.

Who this works for

Scale-ups that have outgrown their founding technical leadership
Companies whose CTO has moved into a pure business role and left a technical leadership gap
Startups that need senior technical judgment but aren’t ready for a full-time CTO
PE or VC-backed companies that need technical leadership during a transition