CTO-Level Decision-Making for Companies That Can't Afford to Get Architecture Wrong
Led by an engineer who built market data systems at NYSE, Interactive Data and Yahoo Finance, and has since delivered card, payment and blockchain platforms. Now we bring that engineering depth to your team, without the full-time CTO investment.
This is what happens without senior technical leadership.
We fix it — without the full-time overhead.
Your Technical Co-Pilot — From Engineers Who've Done It at Scale
Most startups hit a point where they need senior engineering judgment — but not a full-time CTO salary. We step in as your technical co-pilot: making architecture calls, unblocking teams, communicating with investors, and building the engineering culture that lets you scale without rewrites.
We work as part of your team, not above it. Embedded in your decisions, available when things get hard — not parachuting in with a deck and disappearing.
No learning curve at your expense. We've built card infrastructure, real-time financial data systems, and blockchain platforms. We know the failure modes before they show up.
We translate technical complexity into language that closes rounds. Architecture into a board deck, system design into a due diligence response — without losing accuracy.
AI shortens our timelines without compromising system integrity. The same AI-augmented workflow we use internally, applied to every engagement, with a senior engineer reviewing what ships.
What You Get
Domains
Who This Is For
The Fractional CTO model works best in specific situations. Here are the ones where we add the most value.
Technical Founders Who've Grown Into CEO
You started as the technical founder, but the company grew and now you're running the business. Your engineering team needs a senior technical voice who isn't you.
Architecture oversight · Team leadership · Hiring · Technical roadmap
Non-Technical Founders Scaling Engineering
You've raised capital and need to scale engineering fast — but you need a trusted technical co-pilot to make the right calls on architecture, hiring, and tooling before you commit to the wrong foundation.
Technical strategy · Vendor selection · Team structure · Investor comms
Bridging a CTO Gap
Your CTO departed or you're in the process of hiring one. You need continuity — someone who can keep the engineering organisation running and make the right decisions while the search progresses.
Interim leadership · Team continuity · Hiring process support
Regulated or Complex Domains
Building in payments, KYC/AML, blockchain, or any domain where architectural mistakes have compliance or financial consequences. You need someone who has navigated these before.
Compliance architecture · Payment rails · Smart contracts · Risk management
Due Diligence & Post-Acquisition
Need a credible technical assessment of a target company, or need to stabilise and improve engineering at a portfolio company post-acquisition. Independent, unbiased, and fast.
Technical due diligence · Architecture audit · Post-acquisition stabilisation
Scaling Teams That Have Slowed Down
The team grew but delivery didn't. Releases are slower, incidents are more frequent, and engineers are unhappy. You need a senior technical perspective on what went wrong and how to fix it.
Engineering process · Observability · CI/CD · On-call culture · Tech debt strategy
Opinions Formed From Building, Not Advising
These aren't borrowed frameworks. They come from running systems at NYSE, Interactive Data, Yahoo Finance and a bank's credit card platform, where the cost of being wrong was immediate.
Most teams don't have a technology problem.
They have a decision-making problem. Bad architecture is almost always the result of decisions made under pressure, without enough context, by people who weren't empowered to push back. We fix how decisions get made — not just what gets built.
More engineers is rarely the answer.
We've seen it at scale. More headcount means more coordination, more process, more meetings — and slower delivery. The answer is almost always better system design and clearer ownership, not another hire. We help you do more with the team you have.
The rewrite is almost always avoidable.
By the time a team is talking about rewriting their system, the decision is already two years late. The patterns that lead there — tight coupling, no observability, skipped design reviews — are detectable early. We catch them before they become crises.
How We Work Together
Three ways to engage — from a single advisory call to a deeply embedded monthly partnership.
Engagements are scoped to your actual needs — typically 8 to 40 hours per month. No retainer lock-in at the advisory level.
CTO Advisory Call
One focused hour with a senior technical mind. Bring your hardest architecture question, your hiring dilemma, or a technology decision you've been going back and forth on. Walk away with a clear perspective.
- 60-minute focused session
- Architecture or strategy question
- Written summary and recommendations
- No retainer required
Monthly Retainer
Ongoing strategic partnership. We become your technical sounding board — available for architecture reviews, team guidance, and strategic decisions throughout the month without project-by-project scoping.
- 8–16 hours per month
- Architecture reviews and roadmapping
- Weekly async availability
- Monthly strategy session
- Investor deck technical review
- Hiring interview support
Embedded CTO
We operate as a deeply embedded member of your leadership team. Attending standups, running architecture councils, leading technical hiring, and being present wherever a full-time CTO would be — at a fraction of the cost.
- 20–40 hours per month
- Team standup participation
- Hands-on delivery support
- Hiring and onboarding
- Board and investor representation
- Custom scope on request
First-Hand Experience in the Domains Where Getting It Wrong Is Expensive
We bring engineering depth across the domains where architectural mistakes have real consequences — enterprise, financial, compliance, or operational. Built from the inside, not the sidelines.
Led the analysis, design, and development of NYSE's PDP-XDP product suite and OpenBook Ultra, NYSE's order book market data product. Drove the architectural decisions that delivered end-to-end market data latency of 40 microseconds, operating under zero tolerance for downtime, data loss, or inconsistency. Optimised the full stack at the systems level — from TCP sockets and epoll handlers to order book state and equity indexing — reducing bandwidth across data feed and retransmission feeds, and architecting data recovery systems to close client data gaps without event loss. Which means we know where high-throughput financial systems fail before you've over-engineered the wrong bottleneck.
Spearheaded the transformation of Yahoo Finance's market data infrastructure — one of the world's most-used finance sites, serving 100 million users with real-time data from over 100 stock exchanges worldwide. Led the establishment of globally distributed private data centres, designed and deployed low-latency feed handlers, and established seamless failover mechanisms across the platform. Drove CI/CD integration, test automation, and monitoring while mentoring and managing the engineering team through complex, globally distributed delivery. Which means we know what genuine fault tolerance actually costs to operate — and when simpler is the right call.
Architected and led delivery of an end-to-end credit card platform for a bank, built on a card-infrastructure provider’s SDK so that companies can issue co-branded credit cards to their customers. Covered customer onboarding with KYC/AML workflows, card issuance and lifecycle management, transaction authorisation, statements and regulatory compliance reporting. Managed frontend, backend and DevOps teams end to end, and owned communication with the bank and the infrastructure provider. Which means we know where card platforms break before you’ve committed to the wrong architecture.
Designed and built from scratch — an e-commerce portal for user and metal asset management, underpinning a hybrid token architecture that combined a physical asset-backed token with a digital asset. Engineered the trust layer giving customers real-time visibility and access to their investment. Managed the full digitisation of the consortium's assets and integrated the complete digital ecosystem end to end. Which means we know which token architectures are sound and which create compliance and trust problems downstream.
Led the technology evaluation and strategic selection across Ethereum, Tendermint, and Hyperledger — then guided embedded teams to implement a tailored Tendermint solution on Cosmos. Owned the full technical stack: P2P connectivity, storage optimisation, consensus mechanisms, node management, and smart contract development. Which means we know how to navigate the blockchain technology decision — not just implement it — and which architectural choices create long-term flexibility versus lock-in.
Built a multi-tenant SaaS assessment platform for educational institutions and enterprises — covering test administration, hierarchical role-based access control, subscription lifecycle management, event-driven processing across isolated tenants, and AI-powered proctoring to ensure assessment integrity at scale. Which means we know how to architect multi-tenant SaaS platforms that keep tenant data isolated, scale across independent organisations, and don't require a rewrite when the customer base grows.
Get Clarity on Your Hardest Technical Decision
60 minutes. No commitment. Bring your toughest architecture question, your hiring dilemma, or the technical decision you've been deferring. Leave with a clear perspective and a path forward.