A fractional CTO who still writes the hard parts.
The gap this fills is rarely “we need more code”. It is that the decisions with long consequences — tenancy, data model, what to buy, who to hire — are being made by whoever is least busy that week. This is senior technical leadership on defined hours, from someone who is still in the codebase.
Four jobs, and the first one pays for the rest.
Not a weekly advice call. These are the things we take responsibility for, in writing, at the start.
The decisions that are expensive to reverse
Most early architecture choices are cheap to make and costly to undo. A fractional CTO earns their fee on that asymmetry alone.
- What to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone for another year
- Data model and tenancy decisions, before a rewrite is the only fix
- Cloud shape and cost, right-sized for the team that has to run it
- The migration path off anything chosen under time pressure
Hands on the keyboard, not only on the whiteboard
A leader who has not touched the codebase is guessing. Ours ship the hard parts themselves, which is also how the advice stays honest.
- The risky piece built rather than delegated and hoped for
- Code review that raises the bar without stalling the team
- Unblocking the thing that has been “nearly done” for three weeks
- Production incidents handled, then written up so they do not recur
Hiring, and the team that comes after
The job is to make itself unnecessary: an engineering team you own, hired well, with standards set before the tenth person arrives.
- Role definitions that describe the work rather than a wish list
- Interviews and technical assessment, including the ones you run
- Levelling, onboarding, and what “senior” has to mean here
- A handover that assumes we leave, because eventually we should
Diligence, audits and the investor conversation
When a term sheet or an enterprise security review arrives, the questions get specific fast — and the answers have to already be true.
- Technical due diligence, on your codebase or one you are acquiring
- Multi-tenancy, access control and the data-handling story, evidenced
- A roadmap a board can read, with the engineering cost attached
- Straight answers about risk, including the ones you would rather not hear
Defined hours, written down, cancellable monthly.
“As needed” is how a fractional arrangement turns into a resented invoice. The hours, the cadence and the decisions the role owns are agreed before the engagement starts.
Model 01 · The usual shape
Embedded fractional CTO
One named senior engineer holding the technical seat inside your company, on defined weekly hours.
They own the architecture decisions, the hiring bar and the hard parts of delivery, and they are accountable to you rather than to a delivery manager. Non-technical founders get the technical counterpart they are missing; technical founders get the person who disagrees with them competently.
Commercials
Model 02
Diligence or architecture review
A fixed-scope read of a codebase, an architecture, or a company you are about to acquire.
A written assessment with the risks named and priced: what is load-bearing, what is a rewrite waiting to happen, and what a buyer or an enterprise security review will find. Milestone-billed, with a price agreed before it starts.
Commercials
Model 03
Leadership plus delivery
The fractional seat alongside a standing block of engineering capacity.
For companies where the decisions and the building both need to happen now: the same person setting direction, with engineers beside them shipping against it, so the roadmap is not written for a team that does not exist yet.
Commercials
The decisions, written up afterwards.
The only honest way to evaluate technical leadership before hiring it is to read decisions the person has already made, including the ones that went wrong.
Case study
Row-level security that was real rather than nominal
Seventy tables with policies that never ran, because the app connected as a role that bypasses them and the policies read a claim nothing set. Two compounding bugs, each hiding the other — exactly the class of thing a diligence review is supposed to catch and usually does not.
Engineering note
Postgres holds the state, the queue holds the delivery
OCR and an LLM round-trip running inside the HTTP handler, with three unsupervised goroutines beside it. The fix is a queue and a worker, which everyone knows; the part that decides whether you get reliability or a new class of incident is what you call the system of record.
Engineering note
One interface, three ERPs that agree on nothing
The abstraction boundary that survived a third integration. A good example of the decision a fractional CTO is there for: the one that looks like an implementation detail in month one and defines the product in month nine.
A senior technical seat, at a cost that suits the stage.
StarkSphere Labs is registered in Dubai and the engineering is done from India, for founders who are mostly in the United States and Europe. We overlap your morning, and the work carries on while you sleep.
A full-time CTO at this seniority is a salary plus meaningful equity. This is part-time hours at a monthly rate, from India, for founders in the US and Europe — which is why the arithmetic works at seed stage rather than after a Series A.
The engineers are senior — eight years and up, out of big-tech and fintech teams — and they are the people you meet on the first call, not a bench you are introduced to afterwards.
Working with us
What founders ask about the fractional model.
What is a fractional CTO?
A senior engineering leader who works with you part-time, on defined hours, instead of being a full-time hire. You get the judgement of someone who has built and run systems before, at the stage where a full-time CTO is either unaffordable or premature — and without handing out a co-founder's worth of equity to find out whether the fit is right.
What does a fractional CTO actually do day to day?
In practice: makes the architecture calls that are expensive to reverse, writes the risky parts of the code, reviews what the team ships, runs the hiring bar, and answers the technical half of diligence and security reviews. Ours stay hands-on deliberately — advice from someone who has not opened the repository in six months is worth what you would expect.
How many days a month is normal?
It is agreed up front as defined weekly hours and written into the engagement, rather than left as “as needed” and argued about later. One or two days a week covers most early-stage companies; a diligence sprint or an incident month is heavier, and we say so in advance rather than quietly invoicing it.
Do I need a fractional CTO, a contractor, or an agency?
A contractor is right when you can describe the thing to be built. An agency is right when you need throughput on a defined scope. A fractional CTO is right when the problem is that nobody is making the technical decisions — when you are choosing between architectures, hiring engineers you cannot yet evaluate, or facing a diligence process. If a call makes clear you need one of the other two, we will tell you, including when that means less work for us.
When is it too early for one?
If you have not yet found the thing worth building, a fractional CTO is an expensive way to have opinions. At that stage you usually want one scoped build — an MVP in front of users — and a decision afterwards. That is a different engagement and we would rather sell you the right one.