Engage.

Format. Embedded part-time. Roughly 8 hours a week. Three to six months is the usual horizon, renewed by mutual agreement.

What you get. A second engineer in the room across architecture, hiring, build-vs-buy, and the operational decisions that don’t fit neatly into any one function. I write code where it accelerates the work, sit on standups when it’s useful, and leave you a written record so the team can carry the decisions forward.

Right call when. You’re pre-PMF, you don’t have a technical co-founder, and you need a peer-level operator on the work without the equity conversation.

Not for. Companies that already have a senior engineering lead and need staff augmentation, or companies large enough to need a full-time CTO running a team of ten. Different shape.

Format. Fixed-fee, two weeks. Kickoff, four to six interviews, directed code review, written report of 15 to 20 pages with a risk matrix and a remediation roadmap. Live walkthrough at the end.

What you get. A board-ready written read on architecture, scalability, code quality, security, and team. Severity, effort estimate in engineer-weeks, and a concrete recommendation per finding. Founder side, investor side, or both. See /tech-audit and /tech-due-diligence.

Right call when. You’re preparing a round, recovering from an incident, inheriting a codebase, or sizing up a deal as an investor.

Not for. Companies that want a penetration test, a compliance certification, or a line-by-line code review. Different engagements, different specialists.

Format. Fixed-fee, one to two weeks. Goal-bounded, not feature-bounded: validate a market thesis with working software, ship an MVP, or architect a platform that can scale beyond the demo.

What you get. Working software, not a deck. Validated with at least one real buyer where the goal was market validation. Or an architecture spec with the trade-offs written down. The deliverable is named in the scope letter before kickoff. Whatever it is, you keep it.

Right call when. You have an idea and need a prototype to test it. You have a stack and need an architecture that can scale beyond the demo. You need an MVP shipped to a real customer in two weeks rather than two quarters.

Not for. Companies that want a six-week build with a long fixed feature list. The sprint is bounded by time, not by spec. Positioning work has its own tier below.

Format. Fixed-fee, one to two weeks. The whole engagement focuses on getting the position right before the next round of build effort or outbound spend.

What you get. The typical deliverables are a positioning doc, a competitive map, a buyer-language matrix, and first-version messaging (homepage hero, sales-deck spine, cold outreach hook). The list above is the default. Anything specific gets shaped with you in the kickoff and written into the scope letter before work starts.

Right call when. You have a product but the buyer is wrong. You have a buyer but the message isn’t landing. You’re about to do an outbound push and don’t trust your hook. You’re prepping a fundraise and the deck is technical-only.

Not for. Companies that need ongoing demand-gen execution (media buying, paid acquisition, content production at cadence). The sprint produces strategy and the artifacts to act on it; running channels is a different role.

Format. Strategic sessions on demand. A single day or a small block of days. No retainer.

What you get. A focused session on the question that’s blocking the call. Architecture review, hiring plan, fundraising prep, build-vs-buy decision, or working through a hard call before it gets quietly made.

Right call when. You have a specific decision in front of you and don’t need an ongoing engagement.

Not for. Anything that requires deep context across the company. The advisory tier is for sharply-scoped questions.

Three steps. Send an email or book a call. We talk for 30 to 45 minutes about the situation and the shape of the engagement. If the match looks clean, you get a one-page scope letter within 48 hours, signed and dated, with the deliverable, timeline, and price written down.

If it’s not a clean match, I tell you what would fit better, even if that’s somewhere else.

Most fractional CTOs are tech only. I’m not. The combination is the position.

Positioning. Market research, competitive landscape, buyer language, naming the wedge, repositioning when the wedge isn’t working. Architecture is a leadership decision; so is the market thesis, and the two move together.

Tech. Software architecture (data model, system boundaries, build-vs-buy at the right grain, refactor-vs-rewrite when the system shows its age). AI engineering (LLM-backed products, RAG, agentic workflows, evaluation harnesses, the operational reality of running models in front of real customers, not lab demos). Hiring, security architecture, enterprise APIs, cloud infrastructure. Depth in EU regulatory and e-invoicing (AI Act, GDPR, DORA, Peppol) where I run an active venture and have done the implementation work, not just read the directives.

Marketing. Sales decks that earn the meeting, landing-page copy that earns the scroll, cold outreach playbooks, and content written for a real buyer instead of an SEO algorithm.

Sales. The shape of the pipeline for the first ten customers, discovery scripts, pricing experiments, the fundraising story, and the awkward call where you ask for the PO.

Generalist by design, specialist where it counts. When the work needs a deeper specialist (a security principal for a compliance audit, a lead on a specific cloud) I bring one in and stay the point of contact.