Many founders reach a point where their product can no longer be led from the founder’s chair alone. A senior technical voice is needed — for architecture decisions, hiring panels, vendor reviews, or to steady the engineering function while the team grows. A full-time CTO is often premature at that stage. A fractional one is not.
I offer CTO-as-a-service for founder-led teams and established organisations that need senior technical direction without the cost of a permanent hire. Engagements are tailored in scope and cadence — from a few days a month of strategic oversight, to a full-time interim placement during a critical phase.
I architect the stack, run the servers, and write the code alongside the team. Work is shown weekly, not quarterly, and there are no slide decks without code behind them.
Where I help
- Architecture and technology choice — selecting the right stack, cloud, and integration patterns for the outcome rather than the trend.
- Interim Technical Director — full-time cover during a transition, a funding round, or a platform migration.
- Hiring and technical interviews — defining roles, screening candidates, and running technical panels.
- Delivery leadership — standing up DevOps, planning cadence, code review, and release discipline with the team.
- Vendor and contract review — assessing external developers, SaaS commitments, and cloud spend before they become expensive.
- Investor and board technical briefings — translating engineering reality into decisions your board can act on.
How an engagement works
Every engagement starts with a short discovery — one or two conversations and a look at the current estate — followed by a written proposal. Typical shapes include:
- Advisory retainer — a set number of days per month for strategic reviews, hiring, and leadership support.
- Interim CTO — full-time cover during a transition, a migration, or a funding round.
- Project-led engagement — senior leadership on a specific build or recovery, with a clear hand-off at the end.
Cadence is what matters most. I prefer weekly show-and-tell sessions, short written updates, and decisions made in the open — so the team and the board can see the same thing at the same time.
Background
I bring fifteen years of engineering leadership. As Technical Director of Catch Digital in London I led a distributed team of more than ten developers and delivered for Cancer Research UK, the Francis Crick Institute, BBC Studios, and Chelsea Barracks. As Drupal Architect at Enovation Solutions in Dublin I orchestrated consultancy work for high-profile enterprise clients. Since 2024 I have been Senior Developer at MSD Animal Health, working on large-scale C# systems, MSSQL data platforms, and internal reporting tools.
Alongside those roles I have built, migrated, and rescued platforms across Drupal, .NET, and — most recently — production retrieval-augmented AI systems.