Fractional CTO & technical advisory
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.
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.
Related services
- System design & architectureThe decisions that are expensive to change later: service boundaries, data flow, platform choices, and the failure modes nobody priced in.
- DevOps & infrastructurePragmatic infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and on-call setup, sized for e-commerce, built to reduce production incidents.
- Performance auditA small fixed-price entry audit: Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, and your three highest-impact fixes. The one-week deep dive with real-user metrics is the follow-up.