Fractional CTO · interim CTO · UK
Part-time senior technical leadership for ecommerce and software businesses: direction, architecture, roadmaps, hiring, and rescuing projects that have drifted. Bring me in as a fractional CTO, an interim CTO or your systems architect, without a permanent hire, scoped month to month with a clean handover.
Three roles, often confused
ForA window
Full-time, usually three to six months, to cover a gap.
PartTime
A few days a month, ongoing.
HandsOn
When the gap is delivery, not direction.
Past roughly fifteen engineers, with product complexity that needs daily executive presence, a business needs a permanent CTO, and a good fractional one will say so and help you hire them.
What the role covers
Outcomes rather than hours. These are the decisions and the work a business without a senior technical head most often needs owned.
Architecture and platforms
Replatforming, choosing between Shopify Plus, Magento or a headless build, deciding whether to build or buy, and planning how the architecture scales before a big season. These are the calls with multi-year consequences, and the ones that are expensive to reverse.
Roadmap
What gets built, in what order and why, written so the board, the team and any agency are working from the same plan. The first ninety days are specific; the rest is direction that is revisited as the business learns.
Hiring and team
Writing the roles, interviewing developers, deciding between an employee, a freelancer and an agency, and supporting the developers you already have. When the business is ready for a permanent CTO, helping you hire them.
Due diligence
Before an acquisition, an investment or a big contract: what the technology really is, what it will cost to keep running, and what could go wrong. The audits page covers the store-level version; this is the business-level one.
Agencies and vendors
Reading proposals, checking estimates, holding agencies to what they said they would deliver, and being the technical person on your side of the table in vendor calls.
Drifted projects
Getting a late or over-budget project back on course, or deciding it should stop. Where the problem is the build rather than the direction, that is a stalled build rescue.
AI and automation
Deciding where automation earns its place across the business, and where it doesn’t, before money is spent on it.
Before you hire
A decision with multi-year consequences and no senior technical head: a fractional CTO. A CTO who just left, or a transition that needs daily senior hands for a known window: an interim CTO. A gap in delivery rather than direction: a lead developer. If you aren’t sure, a short scoping engagement answers that first, including when the answer is none yet.
On the value of the engagement: what it has to achieve, agreed in writing before it starts. There is no day rate or rate card; the price follows the outcomes, not the hours.
Outcomes, not hours: the replatform decision and the ninety-day plan, not being available on Tuesdays. Architecture, roadmaps, hiring, technical due diligence and the projects that have drifted.
For UK engagements the status is agreed up front. A genuine fractional or interim engagement, defined by deliverables and worked across several clients, is usually outside IR35, but it should be assessed rather than assumed.
With a defined end or a defined point where you move to a permanent hire, built in from the first day, and a clean handover of everything in writing.
Yes. Eighteen years of building means the calls I make are ones I could carry out myself, and on a small team I often do.
UK based · PHP · Python · JS · TS. Every first call is free.
