Fractional CTO
The technical decisions, made before the money is spent.
Senior judgement on the calls that are expensive to reverse — architecture, build-or-buy, vendor selection — without a full-time executive salary.
You have decisions in front of you that cost real money and are hard to undo, and nobody in the building is positioned to make them. The engineers are close to the code and not to the commercial constraints. You can evaluate the business case and not the technical one.
This sits inside technical advisory, and it is the arrangement rather than the title that matters. The model works when the job is judgement-dense and infrequent. It fails when the job is availability — more on fractional executive sets out the test I use to tell the two apart, and it disqualifies as often as it qualifies.
What the arrangement covers
An ongoing arrangement
Some days a month, continuing. Architecture calls, vendor decisions, estimate review, and the technical half of conversations with investors or enterprise buyers.
Interim cover
Full-time and temporary, with a defined end. Filling a gap while you hire, or after a departure. This is the version that includes availability, and it is priced accordingly.
Deciding whether to hire one at all
A short engagement to work out what the job actually is before a salary is committed. Frequently the useful answer is that you need a senior engineer rather than an executive.
A second opinion on a specific decision
A build-or-buy call, a platform choice, an estimate that feels wrong. Bounded, with a written recommendation and the conditions under which I would reverse it.
What it costs
Priced by the arrangement rather than by the title. The rate depends on the response expectation more than on the day count, because availability is the expensive part.
Before you start a search
The title covers three jobs that have little in common — the builder, the scaler, and the person who answers to investors and security reviewers. More on chief technology officer sets out all three and the question worth asking before you write a job description: what breaks in the next twelve months if nobody does this job.
If you are on the other side of that question and building toward the seat yourself, more on how to become a CTO covers the same three jobs from the candidate's side.
Related engagements: outsourced cto services covers the interim and outsourced variants, and what build vs buy analysis covers is often the specific decision that prompts the first conversation.
What you can inspect
Client work is confidential, so the evidence available is my own. Watch egress policy agent run — a policy engine that, on a real two-minute capture, generated rules for 0 of 19 destinations and said so, because a process name is not a stable identity and two minutes is not a baseline.
That is the disposition you are hiring: a preference for saying what the evidence supports rather than what would sound better.
When this is the wrong answer
If what you need is somebody reachable — holding the pager, in the room when a customer escalates, unblocking the team daily — a part-time arrangement does not provide it, however senior the person is. That is a full-time hire, and I will say so on the call rather than after the contract.
It also does not work where there is nobody competent executing between sessions. In that situation I become a bottleneck with a two-week latency, which is worse than no senior input at all.
Related
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Bring the decision, not a brief.
Thirty minutes. If a full-time hire is the right answer, I will tell you on the call.