You've outgrown your stack
Spreadsheets, shared drives, and a pile of SaaS tools stitched together are quietly capping your growth. You need an architecture and roadmap a board can fund.
Fractional CTO · Technology Advisory · Technical Due Diligence
Your next technical leader — without the full-time hire.
I help owners and boards of small and mid-sized companies make confident technology decisions: architecture that scales, security and compliance your auditors can verify, teams that ship, and an AI strategy that pays for itself. Twenty-five years building systems — twelve leading teams — from fifteen-person startups to a 100+ person engineering organization.
- 25+
- years shipping production systems
- 60
- engineers led & mentored
- $20M
- annual engineering budget owned
- 80%
- cloud cost reduction delivered
The problem you're trying to solve
You can't hire a full-time CTO yet
A $250K+ hire is too expensive and too risky before you know what the role should do. You need senior judgment 10–20 hours a month, not a résumé.
You're the technical founder
You built the product; now you need a peer to pressure-test architecture, security, and hiring plan before you bet payroll on it.
How companies work with me
1Fractional CTO
Standing technical leadership: architecture and security roadmap, vendor and cloud strategy, hiring plan and interview loops, interim leadership while you recruit the permanent hire, board-ready reporting. Typically 10–20 hours a month.
2Technical due diligence
Independent review before an acquisition, funding round, or major platform bet: what you actually own, what it costs to run, and what breaks at 10× scale. Fixed fee, written report.
3Build & launch
0→1 delivery: team structure, tech stack, CI/CD, observability, disaster recovery and compliance evidence — plus the first hires, hired well.
Meet your fractional CTO
Twenty-five years of shipping production systems — plus twelve years leading and hiring the teams that run them. I was the CTO of a six-country fintech before "fractional" was a title, so the advice comes from owning the budget line, not advising it.
- Wore the CTO seat: architecture reviews, security reviews, hiring loops, board decks.
- Now the technical peer for owners and boards of small and mid-sized companies.
- M.S. + B.S. Computer Science, USC — still comfortable in the terminal.
Proof, not promises
- Built a 20-person multi-national engineering org for a fintech — two redundant OpenStack data centers, 500+ users across 6 countries.
- Led payments and rewards platforms serving millions of members; drove an SRE culture that measurably improved SLA/SLO attainment.
- Migrated a company from AWS/Heroku to GCP: −80% infrastructure cost, higher performance.
- Cut page load from 7s to 2s; lifted ad revenue over 40% with a real-time bidding system.
- Ran security and usability audits for banking and financial systems.
Nine areas of expertise
Security · Architecture · AI Strategy · Performance · Infrastructure · Disaster Recovery · Compliance · Team Building · O&M of custom systems
Every engagement is scoped around your business risk, not my résumé. You get decisions, documented — with trade-offs a board can read.
Also on this site
- Expertise — what I deliver per engagement area
- Experience — technical and management track record
- About — background and approach
- Contact — calendar, email, QR business card
- Blog — notes on fractional CTO work: architecture, security, compliance, AI strategy