1 to 2 days/week · monthly retainer
Senior technical leadership, without the W2.
We embed with your team for one to two days a week. Architecture reviews, hiring panels, vendor calls, on-call escalation. The kind of CTO work that does not justify a full-time hire yet, but cannot wait until you can afford one.
No email gate on audits. No sales pitch on the call.
What you get
Six specific outputs every month.
Not a slide deck. Not a Slack-ghost retainer. The work that changes what your engineers ship next week.
Architecture reviews
Weekly review of pull requests, system designs, and infra decisions. We push back on lock-in and complexity in writing.
Hiring support
Job specs, technical screens, and final-round panels. We will not hire for you, but we will tell you which candidates can ship.
Vendor and tooling calls
We sit on the procurement calls, read the contracts, and flag the lock-in clauses. Open source first, vendors when justified.
On-call escalation
When your team gets paged at 2am and needs a second pair of eyes, we are reachable. Within reason, in business hours of one US timezone.
Documented decisions
Every recommendation lands as a markdown ADR in your repo. When the engagement ends, the reasoning stays with the code.
Quarterly roadmap
A short, technical plan reviewed every 90 days: what to build, what to refactor, what to retire. Your CEO and your engineers can both read it.
Free audit and intake
We run a free platform audit on whatever exists, then a 60-minute intake call. We come back with a written scope and a yes or no.
Month 1: Embed
Slack invite, repo access, calendar coordination. We attend your standups, review pull requests, and write the first ADR by week 2.
Months 2 onward: Operate
Architecture cadence locks in. Hiring panels run. Vendor calls get scheduled. Kimai timesheet shows every hour, every week.
What it costs
Monthly retainer, scoped on the call.
Fractional CTO is a monthly retainer. The number depends on hours per week, on-call expectations, and team size. We quote it in writing before any work starts, and you can cancel with 30 days notice.
See current pricing on /pricing.
Other engagements
Three more ways to work with us.
Ready for senior technical cover?
Free audit first, plain-English report, zero sales pressure.