CTO-level technical leadership without a full-time hire.
A CTO for hire provides technical leadership, architecture decisions, team hiring guidance, and investor due diligence support — on a contract basis. For Series A companies that need CTO-level judgment but aren't ready for a full-time executive hire.
Need CTO-level technical leadership — architecture decisions, team hiring, technical roadmap — without a full-time executive hire
Pre-Series A companies often have a gap: they've outgrown the technical decisions made in the MVP phase, but they don't yet have the revenue to justify a full-time CTO at $200k+/year.
What CTO-level leadership provides:
Architecture review: Is the current technology capable of supporting the next 18 months? Where are the scaling risks? What refactors are necessary vs premature?
Technical hiring: What does the engineering team need to look like in 12 months? What interview processes and technical assessments find the right people?
Engineering culture: Code review standards, deployment processes, incident response, on-call rotation — the practices that scale with the team.
Investor due diligence: Series A investors conduct technical due diligence. A CTO explains the architecture, the team, and the technical roadmap in terms investors understand.
Vendor/partner decisions: Cloud providers, SaaS tools, infrastructure costs — decisions that have 3-year cost implications.
When to transition to a full-time CTO: When the engineering team is 3+ people, the technical roadmap is core to investor narrative, and the architecture decisions are happening weekly — that's when full-time CTO is justified.
Technical leadership engagement covering architecture review, roadmap planning, team structure, and investor technical due diligence
Architecture review
and technical debt assessment
Roadmap planning
with engineering estimates
Hiring criteria
and interview process design
Due diligence preparation
for investor technical review
Team structure
recommendations
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
Technical leadership engagement covering architecture review, roadmap planning, team structure, and investor technical due diligence
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
CTO engagement scope is the deliverable set: architecture doc, roadmap, team plan. Fixed-price.
Questions, answered.
Same concept, different framing. CTO for hire: project-based, specific deliverables. Fractional CTO: ongoing, part-time commitment.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.