Fractional CTO.
Practical, not theoretical.
I help companies make the tech calls that hold up—architecture, hiring, AI, and the roadmap behind them. 25+ years leading engineering. 50+ products shipped. I've done the job, not just advised on it.
Experience across
50+
Products shipped
25+
Years leading engineering teams
20+
Companies taken to market
100K+
End users on platforms I've built
Where I plug in
Different stages, same job—make sure the technology decisions match the business.
Startups & Founders
You're shipping an MVP, hiring your first engineers, or scaling past product-market fit. You need someone who's been the CTO—not a coach who's read about it.
Start here →Growth & Mid-market
You have a real engineering team and real revenue, and the tech decisions are getting expensive. I come in 1–2 days a week to unblock hiring, architecture, and AI strategy without replacing your VP Eng.
Get in touch →Enterprise & PE-backed
You need a technical voice in the room for diligence, a turnaround, or a platform bet the board is watching. I lead, write, and defend the plan—and work alongside your existing leadership, not around them.
Get in touch →What I actually do
No decks for the sake of decks. I get involved where the decisions are made and stay long enough to see them work.
- Technology strategy tied to the business, not the trend cycle
- Architecture reviews and decisions that hold up past the next rewrite
- AI strategy that ships to production instead of to a slide deck
- Product strategy and roadmap ownership—discovery to prioritization, from someone who can also ship it
- Engineering org design, hiring, and leveling
- Technical due diligence for investors, acquirers, and boards
- Interim CTO or VP Eng coverage during a gap or transition
- Embedded leadership—in your meetings, on your hard calls
Built for founders.
I've taken SaaS platforms from zero to thousands of paying users. Not code reviews—I help you build the right thing and scale it properly.
I work with founders who are…
- Launching an MVP and need product/tech clarity
- Drowning in tech debt and misaligned priorities
- Scaling fast and need strategic technical leadership
- Hiring engineers but don't have a technical partner to vet decisions
- Looking for product-market fit with lean, focused execution
What you get
- A clear product roadmap tied to what your customers actually need
- Architecture decisions that won't need to be rewritten at scale
- Your first 3–5 engineering hires—vetted and structured right
- Infrastructure that lets your team ship daily, not monthly
- An AI strategy that creates real value—not expensive experiments
- Technical due diligence that gives investors and buyers confidence
- A team culture that retains your best engineers
- Engineering managers who can lead without you in the room
- A scaling playbook from 3 engineers to 30+
I can step in weekly, monthly, or for a fixed engagement—flexible to your stage.
AI is changing everything. Most companies are getting it wrong.
The opportunity is real—but so is the waste. I help teams cut through the hype and make AI bets that actually ship to production.
Agentic Systems
Multi-step AI agents that take real actions—booking meetings, filing tickets, running analyses across your tools. I architect the orchestration, error handling, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.
RAG & Knowledge Systems
Internal search over your docs, Slack, codebase, and databases. Hybrid vector + keyword retrieval with reranking—so your team gets real answers, not hallucinated ones.
Voice & Conversational AI
Real-time voice agents for support, sales qualification, and scheduling. I handle the latency, telephony integration, and human handoff architecture.
AI-Native Products
Products where AI is the core value—not a feature bolted on. Personalization engines, generative content, dynamic pricing. Build a moat, not a thin API wrapper.
Computer Vision & Multimodal
Document extraction, quality inspection, video understanding. Vision models are replacing legacy OCR and manual review across industries.
AI-Augmented Development
Coding assistants, automated testing, PR review, and migration tooling integrated into your CI/CD pipeline. Ship faster with AI in the workflow.
Build vs. Buy vs. Compose
Most teams should call APIs, not train models. I help you decide which layers to own and which to rent.
Cost Management
A feature that costs $0.02 per request at 100 users costs $60K/month at scale. Caching, prompt optimization, and model routing are architectural requirements.
Security & Compliance
Prompt injection, data leakage, PII in context windows, SOC 2 and HIPAA implications. Solvable—but only with deliberate design.
The CTO who owns the product, not just the build.
Most product-heavy SaaS doesn't need a CTO and a head of product fighting across a handoff seam. It needs one leader who owns the roadmap and the architecture—and makes the tradeoff in real time. That's the seat I take.
Product Strategy & Roadmap
I own the what and the why—sequenced so each release sets up the next. Bets, not Gantt charts: a plan that survives contact with reality and that the team and the board can both trust.
Continuous Discovery
Turning customer signal into validated bets every week, not once a quarter. AI collapsed the cost of research and synthesis—so I run the discovery loop directly instead of routing it through a research team.
Prioritization That Sticks
Frameworks your team actually uses, weighing customer impact against the architectural cost to build and maintain—because I own both sides of that tradeoff, in real time.
Founder-to-First-PM Transition
When to make your first product hire, what to scope the role around, and how to cover the gap until then. The honest answer for your stage—not a push to staff up before you need to.
AI-Native Product Decisions
Build vs. buy vs. wrap, model selection, and eval-gated launches. The product calls that are inseparable from the technical ones—made by someone accountable for both.
Product / Engineering Operating Model
Designing how product and engineering actually work together—including the product-engineer org structure that fits lean, sub-20-person teams shipping with AI.
One Leader, Both Sides
Roadmap and architecture in one head. The tradeoff between worth building and worth maintaining happens in real time, with full context—not in a negotiation across a handoff seam.
Judgment Over Busywork
AI eats backlog grooming, research synthesis, and status reports. I own the dense core that's left: strategy, taste, and catching the model when it's confidently wrong.
Know When to Split
The integrated model has a shelf life. As the product surface widens, I'll tell you honestly when it's time to bring on a dedicated product leader—and help you hire one.
How I work
Every engagement follows the same structure—so you see results fast, not months of “discovery.”
Week 1: Deep Dive
I audit the codebase, team, and roadmap. You get the three biggest risks and the quick wins you can ship immediately.
Weeks 2–4: Strategy & Structure
We align the roadmap with technical reality and fix the process, hiring, and architecture gaps.
Ongoing: Embedded Leadership
I join your leadership meetings, unblock the team, and own the critical calls. 1–2 days per week, scaled to what you need.
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute intro call to see if there's a fit.
Not a consultant. Not an agency.
I've been the CTO, the architect, and the product lead across oil & gas, finance, logistics, and AI. I've sat in the seat. I don't hand you a report and walk away—I lead your technology function like it's my own.
| Consultant | Agency | Fractional CTO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivers | A report | Code to spec | Outcomes over time |
| Accountability | Advisory only | To the SOW | To your business goals |
| Team access | External | External | In your leadership team |
| Duration | Project-based | Project-based | Ongoing partnership |
Industries I've built for
Every industry has its own constraints. I've shipped products across all of these.
Oil & Gas
Field ops & asset management platforms
Heavy Industry
Workforce & equipment systems
Financial Services
Trading, compliance & risk platforms
Logistics
Supply chain & fleet automation
AI & Machine Learning
Agents, RAG, voice AI, and AI-native products
SaaS
Multi-tenant platforms from zero to scale
What clients say
“Craig helped us cut through the noise and align our roadmap with customer needs and tech feasibility. He acted as our CTO when we needed one the most—without slowing us down.
“We were scaling fast and making expensive technical mistakes. Craig brought structure to our engineering org and helped us ship twice as fast with half the rework.
Let's talk.
Need senior technical leadership without the full-time commitment? Grab 30 minutes and we'll figure out if there's a fit.
Let's talk →