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Fractional CTO & Technical Advisory

You have developers, whether freelancers, an agency or a small in-house team, and nobody senior checking their work. We act as your technical counterpart on a monthly retainer: reviewing what gets shipped, sitting in on planning, setting engineering standards, and translating between your commercial goals and their technical decisions. You keep your team. You stop flying blind.

This is you if

  • Your developers are shipping and you cannot tell whether the work is any good
  • Estimates keep slipping and you have no independent read on why
  • You are about to hire engineers and nobody on your side can interview them
  • Your agency is the only party who understands your own system
  • Technical decisions are being made without anyone pricing the commercial consequences

If none of these describe your situation, this is probably the wrong service. The other service lines may fit better, and a consulting session is the cheapest way to find out.

What's included

  • Continuous review of the code and architecture your existing team ships
  • We join your planning and technical calls as your side of the table
  • Engineering standards set in writing: definition of done, review rules, release process
  • Hiring support, including technical interviews and evaluation of candidates or agencies
  • Monthly written report on delivery health, technical risk and where the money is going
  • Monthly rolling, cancellable with 30 days' notice

Typical stack

Architecture governanceCode reviewDelivery reportingTechnical hiring

What you get

  • Problems surfaced while they are still cheap to fix
  • A technical peer for your developers, so quality stops depending on trust alone
  • Commercial decisions made with the engineering consequences already priced in
Re: this serviceDiscuss

How the engagement runs

  1. Onboarding, weeks 1–2

    We read the codebase, meet the team, and write a baseline assessment of where the delivery risk actually sits.

  2. Standards, month 1

    The engineering standards agreed in writing with your team rather than imposed on them, because a standard nobody accepted is not a standard.

  3. Ongoing, monthly

    Code and architecture review, planning attendance, and a written monthly report. Rolling engagement, 30 days' notice either way.

What you walk away with

  • Continuous review of what your existing team ships, in their repositories, on their schedule
  • Written engineering standards: definition of done, review rules, release process, on-call expectations
  • A monthly report on delivery health, technical risk and where the budget is actually going
  • Technical interviewing and evaluation when you hire developers or replace an agency
  • A named senior engineer who joins your planning and technical calls as your counterpart

What this does not cover

  • Writing production code — the point is oversight, not becoming another pair of hands
  • Line management of your team; we set standards and report, you hold the relationship
  • 24/7 on-call, which belongs to whoever operates the system day to day

Naming the exclusions up front is cheaper for both of us than discovering them in week six.

How to start

Reviewed 2026-09-09. Figures in USD, excluding tax.

Fractional CTO cover

monthly, quoted on days committed

You already have developers — freelance, agency or in-house — and nobody senior checking their work, so quality currently depends on trust alone.

If it goes wrong

Three months in you should be able to point at a written engineering standard your team follows, monthly risk reports including things you did not want to hear, and at least one problem caught in review. If you cannot, end it — it is monthly rolling for exactly that reason.

Why not next quarter: The problems this catches are cheap in review and expensive in production. Every month without it is a month of decisions nobody senior has read.

Book a scoping callSend the details instead
Every offer, side by side

Before you ask

Can you review the work of my current agency without replacing them?
Yes, and this is the point of the fractional CTO retainer. We sit on your side of the table as your technical counterpart: reviewing what your existing team ships, joining planning calls, setting written engineering standards, and reporting monthly on delivery health and risk. You keep the team you have. You stop having to take their word for it.
Read every answer

Two ways to start, both of them cheap.

Book a call and talk it through, or write the problem down and send it — whichever you would actually do today. Either way you get a reply from an engineer within one business day, and an honest answer about whether we are a fit.

Book a discovery callSend a project brief

Not ready for either? A $600 consulting session buys one straight answer with no obligation to hire us.

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