Fractional CTO Services for US & EU Series A–C Startups

A fractional CTO fits three moments. Pre-Series-A: you have 5 to 15 engineers, a technical founder who is also doing product and sales, and no budget yet for a full-time CTO hire. Between CTOs: your CTO left, search will take six months, and the engineering org cannot run rudderless. Scaling past 20 engineers: the founder-CTO still wants to write code and you need a peer who can run architecture review, hiring loops, and board reporting. Once you are 40+ engineers or post-Series-C, hire full-time and we run the transition.

An advisor reads your deck for one hour a month and gives opinions. A fractional CTO is contractually inside your operating cadence: weekly 1:1 with the founder, bi-weekly engineering staff meeting, monthly architecture review, quarterly board update. We sign NDAs and DPAs, get git access, talk to your engineers, run hiring loops, and own deliverables. We co-author the engineering section of your board deck and stand behind it in the meeting.

Three engagement tiers. Advisory is 2 days per month (one full day of staff meetings + roughly four hours per week of async review). Active is 4 days per month (weekly half-day on-site or video + async). Embedded is 8 days per month (two days per week of operational engineering leadership). Each tier is a transparent monthly retainer with the budget agreed before work starts. All tiers include weekly founder 1:1 and a monthly written report.

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons clients hire us. We write the role spec, calibrate comp against US and EU benchmarks, source through our network, run technical interviews, and run reference checks. We sit on the hiring panel with the founder and the board. When the full-time CTO joins, we run a 30 to 60 day handover and step down. Roughly 40 percent of our engagements end this way and we treat it as a successful outcome, not a lost retainer.

Always. Every engagement starts with a mutual NDA, an IP assignment clause, and a DPA aligned to GDPR for any personal data we touch. For investor-side technical due diligence we sign the fund's specific NDA and conflict-check against any portfolio company before accepting. We are GDPR-aligned, SOC 2 Type II in progress, HIPAA-capable for healthtech diligence, and CCPA-acknowledged for US consumer products.

Each tier is a transparent monthly retainer, with the budget agreed before work starts. Three-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days notice. Scope that sits outside the retainer — extra hiring loops, a security or SOC 2 readiness sprint, fundraise or M&A diligence — is quoted separately at a transparent day rate rather than inflating the base retainer. We do not bill for travel inside EU, and US on-site is billed at cost with no markup.

No. A fractional CTO leads and multiplies the team you already have; we do not displace engineers. We run the 1:1s, unblock architecture decisions, set the review bar, and mentor your senior developers into tech-lead roles so leadership capacity stays after we step down. Where a genuine capacity gap exists, we can staff it through our dedicated teams or staff augmentation rather than pushing you to hire full-time before the roadmap justifies it.

Yes, on both sides of the table. For founders raising a round we prepare the data room: architecture diagrams, security posture, scalability model, tech-debt register, and a defensible engineering narrative that survives an investor's technical partner. For funds and acquirers we run buy-side diligence — code and architecture review, team assessment, and a risk-rated report. We conflict-check against portfolio companies before accepting buy-side work and sign the relevant NDAs first.

Yes. The fractional CTO owns your security and compliance posture as part of the engagement: threat model, access control, secrets and key management, vendor risk, and an evidence-collection plan. For SOC 2 we map controls, close gaps, and prepare you for the Type I then Type II window; for GDPR we run the data-flow mapping, DPA chain, and residency calls for EU users. Deep, time-boxed readiness sprints are scoped separately from the retainer so the base engagement stays predictable.

That is a common and productive setup. We act as a peer to your CTO on a specific mandate — a platform re-architecture, a compliance program, an M&A integration, or scaling the org past a painful headcount threshold — without stepping on their authority. The mandate, boundaries, and who owns which decisions are written down before work starts, and the CTO is a party to that agreement so there is no ambiguity in the room.

We keep a working overlap with both US and EU teams. For EU founders we operate inside CET business hours; for US founders we guarantee a daily overlap window covering East Coast mornings and hold synchronous ceremonies — founder 1:1, staff meeting, board prep — inside that window. Async review, written reports, and code feedback run continuously, so a distributed team is not waiting on a single time zone to make progress.

Typically within a week of signing. Onboarding is a structured two-week ramp: NDA, DPA and IP assignment first, then read-only access to code, infrastructure and metrics, founder and engineer interviews, and a baseline assessment of architecture, team, security and roadmap. By the end of week two you have a written findings document and a prioritized 90-day plan — not a vague "let's see how it goes" — and the regular operating cadence is already running.