A senior pair of hands and a senior pair of eyes, on the same week.
Senior product engineering, embedded — without the hiring runway.
What “senior” actually means here
Senior, to me, is less about years and more about judgement. It’s the ability to spot the load-bearing decisions and slow down for them, while moving fast on everything else. To say “no” to good ideas because the better ones are also on the table. To know when a 4-day custom build beats a 6-month platform integration, and when it’s the other way around.
That judgement is what most early-stage teams are actually missing — not raw hands.
How a fractional CTO retainer usually works
- A weekly cadence: 1–2 days inside your business.
- Office hours for the team, plus async on the rest.
- I’m in your hiring loops, your vendor calls, your “should we…?” decisions.
- I write code when it earns its keep — not as a default.
- A 90-day review baked in. If it’s not pulling its weight, we cut it.
Migrations: my favourite kind of project engineering
Replatforming, vendor swaps, monolith-to-services splits, infra moves — these are the projects most likely to go sideways. They’re also the ones where calm, methodical engineering shows up best.
See the Lasting SEO CallRail → Twilio migration for a concrete example: zero dropped calls on cut-over day, immediate cost savings, no drama.