When you need a fractional CTO
You're a founder making technology decisions without a senior engineer in the room. You're hiring developers, choosing a stack, picking vendors, signing infrastructure contracts — and you don't know if you're making the right calls. A fractional CTO is the senior voice that sanity-checks those decisions before they become expensive mistakes.
You have a development team but no technical leadership. Maybe the team is competent but junior. Maybe they're external. Either way, no one is owning architecture, code quality, or technical roadmap. Things ship, but they ship inconsistently and the technical debt is compounding.
You're raising or planning to raise. Investors will ask hard technical questions. A fractional CTO sits in due-diligence calls, owns the technical narrative, and gives your raise the credibility it needs.
What a KlivIQ fractional CTO actually does
Technology strategy and roadmap. We turn your product ambition into a concrete 6–12 month technical plan — what gets built, in what order, by whom, on what stack.
Architecture decisions. Stack selection, database design, infrastructure choices, AI adoption decisions. We make the calls that are hard to reverse later — and we make them with the experience of having shipped them many times.
Team oversight. Hiring senior engineers. Reviewing code from your existing team. Setting standards. Mentoring leads. Running technical interviews. Replacing under-performing vendors.
Investor and board support. Technical due diligence prep. Architecture walkthroughs. Quarterly board updates. Sitting in investor calls when the technical conversation gets serious.
How the engagement works
Monthly retainer, typically 10–20 hours per week. Fixed monthly fee — no hourly billing games. Minimum 3-month engagement so we have time to actually move the needle.
Weekly standing call with you. Daily Slack/WhatsApp availability for urgent decisions. Direct involvement with your engineering team — code reviews, architecture sessions, hiring interviews.
Month one is foundation: audit, roadmap, immediate priorities. Months two onward: execution, oversight, scaling.
What you get that a freelance consultant won't give you
20+ years of enterprise software leadership across banking, retail, healthcare, and logistics — including systems that handle millions of transactions a day. We've seen what breaks at scale and we design for it before it breaks.
An accountable owner. Not advice from the sidelines. We own outcomes, sit in your meetings, and answer to your board if needed.
An entire delivery team behind us. If you need engineers to actually build something, we bring them in. You get one engagement, one accountable lead, one bill.