Fractional CTO and Technical Advisory for Growing Teams
Someone who has seen a lot of architectures, tech debt and bad decisions, available on a sensible cadence.
For the calls you cannot easily walk back. A new architecture, swapping a database, splitting a monolith, picking a cloud, or hiring your first in-house engineering leader. Sometimes it is simply that your CTO is stretched thin and wants a second opinion from someone with no stake in being right.
In practice it looks like a weekly or biweekly session with your technical leads plus async questions in between. We read the code, sit in on architecture reviews, flag risks, and write the important things down so they do not quietly drift. We do not run your team. We stand next to the person who does.
Past roughly ten engineers, the questions shift from purely technical to organisational — deploys slow down, hiring feels random, architecture decisions happen in Slack and nowhere else. That work sits here too: team topology, on-call, hiring process, and the infrastructure investments that actually unblock delivery.
What you get
Decisions that survive contact with next quarter
Written down with the reasoning and the alternatives considered, so the team can revisit them without re-running the whole argument from memory.
Risk surfaced before it is expensive
The point of an outside reader is catching the thing everyone internally has normalised. Usually it is a single-person dependency or a deploy process nobody wants to touch.
Organisational scaling, not just architecture
Team topology, a hiring plan, an on-call rotation that does not punish the same three people, and a short list of infrastructure work with rough costs. A brittle pipeline is often a management problem and a team burning out is often an architecture problem.
Included
- Weekly or biweekly sessions with technical leads
- Architecture and technology decision reviews
- Written decision records
- Delivery and process diagnostics
- Team topology and hiring plan
- On-call and incident response design
- Async access between sessions
Selected work
A few projects where this was the job.
Fenix
Electrical certification management platform that transforms the certification process. Features dashboard with issued and draft certificate tracking, recent drafts overview, and streamlined workflows for Domestic EICR, EICR, EL, and MEIWC certifications.
Grupo Size
Landing page for Grupo Size where it shows their entire business and relevant companies & contacts.
Altcoinist
Web3 creator economy platform enabling content creators to build communities with blockchain-powered monetization. Features creator TVL (Total Value Locked) leaderboards, subscriber and staker tracking, airdrop management, and an AI-powered search engine. Built with Solidity smart contracts, Next.js frontend, and Node.js backend deployed on Digital Ocean with Supabase.
Common questions
When does it make sense to bring in advisory?
When you are about to make a call you cannot easily walk back. New architecture, swapping a database, splitting a monolith, picking a cloud, or hiring your first in house VP. Sometimes companies just want a second opinion because their CTO is stretched thin. All valid reasons.
What does it look like day to day?
Usually a weekly or biweekly session with the technical leads, plus async questions in Slack. We read the code, sit on the architecture reviews, flag risks, and put the important things in writing so they do not drift. We do not run your team. We stand next to the person who does.
How is this different from a full code audit?
An audit is a point in time deep dive. Advisory is ongoing and more conversational. Think of the audit as a checkup and advisory as having a good doctor on call. A lot of clients do both. One tells you where you are, the other helps you not wander off a cliff next quarter.
We are growing fast and things are creaking. Is that this?
Yes, that is a common shape. Past about ten engineers the old habits start to strain: deploys slow down, hiring feels random, decisions stop being written anywhere. We look at org structure, on-call, hiring process and the infrastructure side together, because pulling one thread moves all the others. If you are still five people, you mostly just need to ship.
What do we actually get out of it?
Concrete things rather than a strategy deck. A hiring plan, a revised team topology, a short list of infrastructure investments with rough costs, and decision records for the calls made along the way. Plus working sessions while the changes actually land. If we cannot see the effect within a quarter, it probably was not worth doing.
