Fractional CTO & Technical Assessment

You raised the round. You are shipping. And every technical decision — architecture, hiring, what to rebuild, what to leave alone — either runs through you, or through nobody.

Hiring a full-time CTO takes six months and real equity, and most companies at this stage do not need one yet. What they need is someone senior enough to tell them the truth about their engineering, and around long enough to make sure it gets fixed.

Start with the assessment

Five days. €7,500, fixed.

Before anyone commits to a retainer, we find out whether your engineering is actually the problem. I spend five days in your codebase, your process and your team, then tell you exactly what I find.

What I look at

• Architecture — what holds at ten times the load, what does not, and what it costs to find out the hard way
• Delivery — how work travels from decision to production, and where it stalls
• The hiring bar — whether your process can tell a good engineer from a great one, and what your last three hires say about that
• Security and compliance exposure — including the GDPR and NIS2 gaps that tend to surface at the worst moment
• Spend — infrastructure and tooling costs against what you actually use
• AI — where it genuinely accelerates your team, and where it is quietly adding risk

What you get

• A written report: findings, severity, and what each one costs you if ignored
• A 90-minute readout with you and whoever else needs to hear it
• A prioritised remediation plan your own team can execute — not a proposal to hire me

If we never speak again, you still own a document you can hand to your next engineering leader, your board, or an investor running diligence.

Then, if it is useful, I stay

Some founders take the report and run with it. Others want the person who wrote it in the room while it gets done.

• Two days a month — €1,900/month. Architecture review, hiring support, and someone to call before a decision rather than after it.
• One day a week — €4,200/month. Embedded: roadmap, technical hiring, build-or-buy and vendor calls, and hands-on time with your engineers.
• Deeper interim engagements — day rate on request.

No minimum term beyond a month's notice. If it stops being worth the money, it should stop.

Is this you?

This tends to earn its cost if:

• you have raised in the last year and the founding team is commercially led
• you are hiring engineers and are not confident you are picking the right ones
• something in the product has slowed down and nobody can tell you why
• you are heading into diligence and would rather know what they will find before they do
• an agency or contractors are building your product and nobody on your side is reviewing their work

It is probably not worth it if you already have an engineering leader you trust. Say so on the call and I will tell you the same.

Who you would be working with

Twenty years building software. Senior software engineer at Meta through February 2026 and at Apple from 2020 to 2024. Before that, Distinguished iOS Architect at BlackBerry, following five years as iOS Software Architect at Good Technology, where I was awarded four patents in mobile security. I have hired, interviewed and calibrated engineers at companies where the hiring bar is the product.

I work from Amstelveen as a KVK-registered ZZP, in English or alongside Dutch-speaking teams, and I take a small number of engagements at a time. See the full track record →