Pre-seed → seed — full technical leadership
8 hours a week for 9 months. Wrote the architecture, hired 3 senior engineers, shipped v1, closed a $1.2M seed round. The team took over with a 30-day overlap.
Senior technical leadership — without the full-time salary.
You need a senior pair of hands on architecture, hiring, and the board — but not full-time. We embed as your fractional CTO / VP Eng, 4–8 hours a week (or more), with a named principal engineer who knows your stack.
Rate $150 – $200 USD / hour · fixed-fee and retainer available
What you get
- Architecture ownership
- written architecture reviews, ADR (Architecture Decision Record) discipline, and a quarterly architecture review with the team.
- Hiring
- JD rewrites, interview loops, scorecards, onboarding playbooks. We hire the first 3–5 senior engineers with you.
- Board narrative
- quarterly technical updates for the board — written in a way a non-technical board member can act on.
- Process
- incident response, on-call rotation, sprint cadence, RFC process, on-call runbooks.
- Fundraise support
- technical due diligence prep, security questionnaire responses, customer security reviews.
- Handover
- when you’re ready to hire a full-time CTO / VP, we onboard them with a 90-day overlap.
How we engage
- 01
Retainer (4 hours / week baseline)
For early-stage companies that need steady-state senior leadership.
- 02
Retainer (8–16 hours / week)
For seed-to-Series-B companies in active build or hire mode.
- 03
Project stint (3–6 months, full-time embed)
For a specific outcome — close a pilot, ship a v1, raise a round, hire the next leader.
Stack we work in
Architecture
AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, serverless, hybrid
Process
Linear, Jira, GitHub Projects, RFC templates, ADRs
Hiring
LinkedIn Recruiter, Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, scorecards
Communication
Slack, Notion, Confluence, Loom, board-deck tooling
Reference architectures
Anonymized patterns from real engagements. Client names omitted; details available under NDA.
Series A → B — VP Eng onboarding
6-month stint: hired the VP Eng, ran the architecture review, wrote the board narrative, supported the Series B technical due diligence. Handover at month 6.
Hardware startup — fundraise technical prep
3-month intensive: 200+ security questionnaire responses, 3 architecture reviews, an investor-ready technical narrative. Closed a $4M round.
Questions we get asked
What’s the difference between a fractional CTO and a senior retainer?
Fractional CTO = strategic ownership (hiring, board narrative, architecture decisions) at 4–8 hours a week. Senior retainer = embedded senior engineer writing and reviewing code 20–80 hours a month.
Do you make technical decisions for us?
No — we make recommendations in writing, with trade-offs. You make the call. The point of a fractional CTO is to make you a better CTO, not to replace you.
Can you help us hire our first full-time CTO?
Yes. We write the JD, run the loop, and onboard them. Most of our fractional clients hire a full-time leader within 6–12 months.
What about board meetings?
We attend the technical segment of board meetings, write the technical update, and handle follow-up questions. We’re comfortable on the board call.
How does the handover work?
When you’re ready to hire a full-time leader, we run a 90-day overlap. The new hire shadows us, then we shadow them, then we hand over. Clean, documented, no surprises.
Let’s scope it properly.
A 30-minute call. No deck, no pitch — we read your repo or your architecture diagram and tell you what’s realistic.