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Industry · SaaS
The senior bench you'd hire if hiring weren't a 6-month story.
Fractional CTO, AI product features, and platform engineering for SaaS teams between seed and scale.
[ industry editorial photo ]
— Editorial photo: laptop open on a wooden table with a coffee, soft window light, one notebook with handwritten architecture sketches. Or a wide shot of a small team in a bright office — backs to camera, looking at a whiteboard. Avoid stock 'startup high-five'.
Why SaaS is a fit
Between seed and Series A is the band where SaaS teams most need senior engineering judgement and least often have it. A full-time CTO is a 6+ month hire and a meaningful salary. The alternatives — generalist agency, body-shop staff aug, founder-coding-at-3am — all have known failure modes.
Fractional senior engineering, done well, threads that needle.
What I typically do for SaaS teams
- Fractional CTO — 1–2 days/week, in the codebase and the hiring loop and the architecture call. Not a slideware “advisor.”
- AI product features shipped end-to-end, with the team owning them on day one.
- Hiring loops designed and run with you — interview design, scorecards, debriefs. Until you’ve made the senior hire that lets me phase out.
- Architecture audits when something has started to feel slow, brittle, or scary — and naming what’s actually going on.
What I won’t do
- Pretend to be your CTO on a slide deck I don’t otherwise show up for.
- Take a retainer I can’t justify with concrete weekly output.
- Stay longer than the engagement deserves. If we’re done, we’re done.