FAQ, terms and more

Often, yes, if what’s missing is technical direction. A CTO does two jobs: running the engineering team (people, hiring, budget, the board) and deciding how things get built. I take the second. I report to you, own the technical decisions with your engineers, and write them up in plain language so you can follow the reasoning without being an engineer. Someone still has to manage the team day to day, usually you or an engineering lead you name. Meanwhile I mentor the engineers you pick, and help you hire the next technical leader if you need one. If the urgent gap is the executive job, such as managing people or presenting to the board, a fractional or interim CTO is the better fit, and I’ll tell you so on the fit call.

Architecture calls and design reviews come to me first: I own them with you through RFCs and decision records, and coach your senior engineers until they can lead the reviews. Incident escalation moves to your team: I set up the alerts, runbooks and on-call rotation so incidents stop landing on you, and take part in every postmortem. I help with hiring, from defining roles to interviewing, and with investor and customer due diligence, from the architecture write-up to the technical questions on calls. People, budget and the board stay with you. I may need some of your time, mostly early on, to agree priorities and who decides what.

By making them easy to find and hard to ignore. Standards live in decision records every team can read, and each team or domain has an internal owner who carries them into its design reviews. A team that disagrees says so in an RFC. How the final call gets made depends on your culture, so we agree it in the first weeks. By default, if an RFC doesn’t settle it, I write a recommendation and you, as the engineering leader I work with, decide. Either way the decision is written down, and it applies to every team.

Yes, if the work is set up for it. Decisions happen in writing through RFCs and decision records, a named internal engineer carries day-to-day execution, and I’m never on the critical path for a release. Those three rules are in every engagement. On the days I’m not working with you, RFCs and design documents still get my review within 2 business days, and any decision that would be expensive to reverse gets a call before it’s made. Time off is announced weeks ahead and planned around your roadmap, and your internal owner keeps execution moving while I’m away. I’m not in your on-call rotation, and I don’t guarantee response times. For a severe incident, your team can call me, and I’ll join when I can, usually within my working hours. I take part in every postmortem, because that’s where the fix that stops the next one gets decided. The goal stays the same: runbooks and alerts good enough that nobody needs me at 3 a.m.

There are six, and each has a guard. I’m not there every day, so RFCs get my review within 2 business days and any decision that’s expensive to reverse gets a call first. I’m not on call, so your team gets the alerts and runbooks to handle incidents without me. Knowledge could leave with me, so every decision is written down and the last month is a handoff to a named owner. My attention is shared, so I take at most two clients and never two competitors. I need real decision rights and an internal owner to work well; without them it’s a poor fit, and I’ll say so on the fit call. And per hour I cost more, but you pay for 10 to 20 hours a week, not 40, with no recruiting fees or equity.

Yes, as part of the architecture work. Threat modeling is part of design reviews, cloud and Kubernetes setups follow least privilege, and security is part of code review, guided by OWASP. I’ve hardened production environments in line with NIST and ISO 27001. I’m not a penetration tester or a CISO, though: for audits and certifications, I work alongside your security lead or auditor.

Teams accept people who make their work easier. For the first two weeks I mostly read code and ask questions. After that, the measure of success is your engineers getting better at their jobs, and they notice that quickly.

Every engagement has an NDA and a clear IP assignment: all work product I create for you belongs to you. My pre-existing tools and general know-how stay with me. I bring patterns from other clients, never their code, data or plans, and your work gets the same protection. I never work with direct competitors at the same time. Investors often introduce me to their portfolio companies; each company engages me directly, under its own NDA.

A monthly retainer, priced by the hours per week: €4,000 a month for 10 hours a week, or €8,000 a month for 20 hours a week, excluding VAT. There are no recruiting fees or equity. The first month is committed; after that you can scale the hours up or down, or stop, with 2 weeks’ notice. The work is remote, and on-site visits can be arranged, with travel billed at cost. The 30-minute fit call is free.

I won’t promise savings before I’ve seen the system. What the first month gives you is a clear basis for deciding: a baseline of where the money goes, the spend that real growth needs separated from the spend that comes from the design, and the fixes ranked by expected impact. That also settles whether your engineers are right that the spend is necessary. If what I find doesn’t clearly justify the retainer, you stop after the first month.

After the first month, scale the hours up or down, or stop, with 2 weeks’ notice. Engagements last six months at most, so the handoff is planned from day one. In rare cases, when the handoff needs more time, we can extend by written agreement. That depends on my availability, so it isn’t guaranteed.

It’s designed not to. Every decision is written down with its reasoning, and a named internal owner carries each area, so nothing depends on me personally. I help define the role and interview candidates, and I’m never a candidate for a role I’m helping you hire for. When your hire starts, we can overlap so they get a proper handover, and every decision I made stays open for them to revisit. That makes the role more attractive: they inherit the reasoning behind each decision, and can change any of it. If the search outlasts the engagement, we can extend while it’s still open, depending on my availability; if I can’t, I hand off to your internal owner and your hire picks up from the decision records.