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 degrades and your one engineer is unavailable, you have a senior engineer to escalate to.
- Investor and board conversations, translating the technical picture into something a non-technical investor can act on.
What the judgment looks like
Two decisions from the ten years of e-commerce engineering behind the practice:
- A per-customer feed generator had grown to a seven-hour runtime. Instead of another optimization round, we measured it, retired it, and reused 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 that one marketplace order with a literal “N/A” customer name had blocked a single flow, and that everything else was healthy. We fixed the order and did not build code around a one-off anomaly.
What this is not
We don’t build features as part of a fractional engagement; that’s a project, and projects are scoped separately. We do 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.