Fractional CTO for founders who need decisions, not slide decks

A fractional CTO is a senior engineer who owns your architecture, your delivery and the technical decisions nobody else on the team can make, for a share of the week instead of a full-time salary. I do this for founders, agencies and product teams from Riga, hands-on in the code, since 2023.

What does a fractional CTO do for you?

• Decides what gets built, in what order, and what does not get built at all. The second list is usually longer and saves more money.
• Owns the architecture: the data model, the boundaries between services, the integrations, and the migration path when the first version has to grow.
• Writes code. Not review-only: I take the hardest part of the system myself, usually the part that moves money or holds the business rules.
• Runs delivery: written scope per feature, pull-request-only main branch, a testing window for your team before anything reaches production, and a written root cause when something breaks.
• Talks to the people around the product: your investors, your regulator, your first enterprise customer, the agency you are replacing.

How does the engagement work?

Two shapes work in practice. An ongoing arrangement of one to two days a week, where I am your technical lead and the person your developers escalate to. Or a defined build of four to twelve weeks, where I take a product from a hypothesis to a live first version and then hand it over or stay on.

I work remotely from Riga, in the CET time zone, in English or Latvian, with German at B1. Meetings are weekly and written: a scope lock at the start of each feature, a demo at the end of each sprint. Between meetings you get pull requests, not status reports.

I also work as extra hands under your existing CTO. If the architecture is decided and what you need is a senior engineer who can take the difficult module without supervision, that is a smaller engagement and a faster start.

What does it cost?

I quote per engagement after a 30-minute scoping call. There is no rate on this page on purpose: a day rate given blind is too high for a straightforward build and too low for a regulated one, and I would rather tell you the number when I can also tell you what it buys. The call is free and ends with a written next step either way.

When is a fractional CTO the wrong choice?

• You need a full-time CTO who is in the office every day and manages a team of ten. A fractional role is for the stage before that, or for a product that will never need that.
• You need a WordPress or Shopify site at a fixed price. An agency is the right answer, and a cheaper one.
• You need a native mobile app first. I do not build them; I bring a partner in and own the backend behind it.
• Nobody on your side can make a decision within a week. I can make the technical calls, but somebody has to make the business ones, and a fractional engagement cannot wait a month for each.

What have I actually run?

• Fluss: Fluss, a multi-tenant commerce and marketplace platform I have built and operated since 2023: 5 languages, 8 plug-ins, 51 payment gateways for different countries. Kreboks, an agricultural B2B marketplace with 500 additional tenants and a target of 6,000, runs on it, as do the MEEPLE board-game rental shop and this site.
• Vuelo: Vuelo, an FCA-authorised Buy-Now-Pay-Later platform for travel, where I have been one of seven engineers since 2025 and own fraud prevention and the search engines behind the travel product.
• Jobsucher: Jobsucher, an AI-assisted job-search product I designed, built and run: bounded AI gateway, validated output, per-run cost caps, billing. Eleven weeks from an empty repository to paid subscriptions.
• Before that, two and a half years at Dun & Bradstreet as the engineer responsible for the Latvian data behind D&B Hoovers and for a company-indexing engine for Latvia, and four years at Latvijas Pasts on systems that had to work in every post office in the country.