Sample Project
Fractional CTO
Kestrel Advisory
Nine-month fractional CTO for a fintech pre-Series A. Cut deploy frequency from monthly to daily and led the SOC 2 prep.
FintechSOC 2AWS
➜ ./webnuvexa --cto
Attaching advisory session▊
Reviewing architecture decisions...
✓ 4 ADRs under review
✓ Release process audited
✓ Hiring plan aligned
Advisory hours remaining▊
// Fractional CTO & Technical Advisory
CTO-level judgement. Fractional cost.
Senior technical leadership on demand — architecture review, stack decisions, hiring guidance, and engineering standards. For the 18 months between "we need a CTO" and "we can afford one."
Advisory Channel Open
v2.4.0
// 01_cto_modules
What We Build
Four ways a fractional CTO shows up — and the decisions each one unblocks.
mod_review
active
Architecture Review
Structured review of your system design, service boundaries, data model, and failure recovery before expensive mistakes compound.
ADRsScalabilityResilience
mod_decisions
active
Technical Decisioning
Documented decisions with written rationale, so the reasoning survives the people who made it.
RFCsADRsTrade-offs
mod_leadership
active
Engineering Leadership
Release process, code review standards, incident practice, and the operating rhythm that lets a team scale past five engineers.
ProcessQualityDelivery
mod_mentoring
active
Team Mentoring
One-to-one coaching for senior engineers preparing for lead roles, plus hands-on pairing on the hard parts.
PairingCoachingLevelling
// 02_cto_capabilities
Advisory Capabilities
The parts of the CTO job that companies most often get wrong on the cheap.
[01]
cto
Technology Strategy
An 18-month technical direction aligned to business goals, with the trade-offs written down instead of implied.
[02]
cto
Architecture Review
Weekly review of design documents and pull requests at senior level — the standard you would want in-house.
[03]
cto
Scaling Readiness
Load, caching, database growth, and queue architecture examined before your first 10x traffic month arrives.
[04]
cto
Hiring & Team Design
Role definitions, interview loops, and levelling guidance calibrated to your actual engineering maturity.
[05]
cto
Engineering Standards
Code review policy, testing strategy, and definition of done that engineers will actually follow under deadline.
[06]
cto
Incident & Reliability
On-call design, severity definitions, blameless postmortems, and the SLOs that make reliability a number, not a hope.
[07]
cto
Vendor & Cost Advisory
Infrastructure and tooling spend reviewed quarterly with real alternatives and migration paths.
[08]
cto
Board & Investor Reporting
Technical progress translated into metrics your board understands without a translator in the room.
// 03_cto_pipeline
Advisory Engagement
A monthly rhythm that keeps decisions moving without another meeting to attend.
phase_01
Onboard
Read the codebase, past incident reports, and roadmap. Meet the team and the founders.
phase_02
Baseline
Architecture, delivery metrics, and team health assessed and shared openly, including what is broken.
phase_03
Intervene
Direct input on design docs, hiring decisions, and the two or three problems actually blocking the roadmap.
phase_04
Build Capability
Coaching, pairing, and process changes so judgement transfers to the team instead of staying external.
phase_05
Step Back
Planned off-ramp. Documentation, hiring plan, and the operating rhythm to keep running without us.
// 04_cto_output
Advisory Engagements
Teams that got senior technical judgement exactly when they needed it.
Sample Project
Architecture Review
Vantage Review
Reviewed a multi-tenant SaaS architecture holding 40x projected load. Found an N+1 cascade before it reached production.
PostgresRedisQueues
Sample Project
Fractional CTO
Ridgeway Scaling
Guided a six-engineer team from services to a platform org: hiring loop, levelling rubric, and a release process that stuck.
PlatformHiringProcess
Sample Project
Team Mentoring
Lumen Mentoring
Coached four senior engineers into lead roles. Two promoted internally within a year; zero regretted attrition.
CoachingLevellingLeadership
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