Fractional CTO
Embedded engineering leadership for companies that need senior judgment but cannot yet justify a full-time CTO. Typical shape: multi-month retainer, weekly cadence, ownership of architecture decisions, hiring strategy, and delivery rhythm.
- $ call when
- You have a real product, real engineers, and the gap between where you are and where you need to be is leadership-shaped.
- $ skip when
- You need someone to write code five days a week or you want a board-level advisor who never opens a terminal.
Architecture Review & Advisory
A short paid engagement: review your system or roadmap, deliver written findings and a prioritized action list, disengage. Useful before a funding round, before a replatform, or before committing to a build-vs-buy call.
- $ call when
- You want a senior outside read on a specific decision and you can spare a week or two for interviews and a written deliverable.
- $ skip when
- You want validation rather than a real opinion. The point of this engagement is that I will tell you what I actually think.
Hands-on Engineering
Custom software, integrations, or specific deliverables taken from spec to ship. This is the player half of player-coach: I write the foundational code, you keep the team free to do the work only your team can do.
- $ call when
- You have a discrete project that needs a senior IC who can also reason about the system around it.
- $ skip when
- The work is genuinely body-shop, the spec is fuzzy, or the timeline assumes a team rather than one person.
AI-Fluent Engineering Practice
Helping engineering teams incorporate AI into their development practice. Drawn from a six-month staff-level IC pivot at an AI-native fintech where the daily question was where AI is genuinely accelerating us, where it is actively dangerous, and where it is a wash.
- $ call when
- Your team is wondering whether to lean into AI tooling and you want a grounded answer rather than vendor enthusiasm.
- $ skip when
- You want a vendor pitch or a model-of-the-month review.
Regulated Systems
Engagements where compliance, security, or audit-trail rigor is the floor rather than a feature. Twenty years across healthtech, fintech, public-safety, and govtech. CISSP-certified.
- $ call when
- Your domain has hard external requirements (HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, state-level public-safety standards) and you need engineering judgment that treats those as design constraints, not paperwork.
- $ skip when
- You need a compliance auditor or a paper trail without engineering changes.