---
title: "Fractional CTO & technical advisory"
description: "Senior engineering leadership on your team, without the full-time salary. A monthly retainer with no project deliverables, so you no longer make major technical decisions alone."
language: "en"
canonical: "https://zapolu.com/services/fractional-cto/"
---

# Fractional CTO & technical advisory

Most e-commerce founders shouldn't hire a full-time CTO. Between seed
stage and Series A the job is too small and too varied to justify the
hire. But the absence of senior technical judgment has visible
consequences. Vendor selection drags on, the roadmap lacks
prioritization, technical debt compounds unnoticed, and hiring
decisions are made without technical assessment.

A fractional CTO engagement gives you that person 1–2 days a week,
on retainer, for as long as it's useful.

## What we do

- **Architecture and technical strategy.** Which things to build,
  which to buy, and which to postpone or drop.
- **Vendor and platform selection.** Independent assessment of agencies,
  freelancers, and SaaS tools. We have no stake in which vendor you pick.
- **Hiring:** interview design, technical screens, reference calls.
  Much of the value is stopping you from hiring the wrong senior
  engineer.
- **Code review and technical due diligence** on an existing codebase,
  an acquisition target, or a contractor's deliverable.
- **Incident and escalation backup.** When production breaks at 2 a.m.
  and your one engineer is on holiday, someone picks up the phone.
- **Investor and board conversations**, translating the technical
  picture into something a non-technical investor can act on.

## What the judgment looks like

Three decisions from past engagements that show the shape of the work:

- A per-customer feed generator had grown to a 7-hour runtime with no
  way forward. Instead of another optimization round, we measured it,
  retired it, and salvaged the two components worth keeping. The
  replacement ran on the ERP side, where the data already lived.
- An alert claimed the whole order pipeline was down. Triage showed
  one marketplace order with a literal "N/A" customer name had blocked
  a single flow; everything else was healthy. We fixed the order and
  deliberately did not build code around a one-off anomaly.
- A vendor quoted two days for a fix in their own module. Matching it
  in-house would have cost the client more for a worse result, so the
  recommendation was: buy the vendor's offer. Advice with no stake in
  the answer is most of what this retainer is.

## What this is not

We don't build features as part of a fractional engagement; that's a
project, and projects are scoped separately. It's not hands-off advice
either. We read your code, your runbooks, and your contracts. And the
time is bounded: one to two days a week, on a monthly retainer, with
a three-month minimum.

When the company grows to need a full-time CTO, we'll say so and
help you hire one.