Fractional CTO services

Fractional CTO services put a senior engineer in the room for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong, without the salary, equity and search time of a full-time CTO. At Shikinox that engineer is our founder, who leads development of a multi-tenant SaaS platform today and takes part in every advisory engagement personally.

Who this is for

• A non-technical founder whose product is being built by an agency or freelancers, with nobody independent checking the work.
• A startup whose first engineer is strong but has not run a platform at scale and needs a sounding board for the big decisions.
• A product company between technical leaders, or one preparing for a fundraise or an acquisition and facing technical due diligence.
• A team deciding whether to build a capability or buy it, and wanting an opinion that is not from a vendor.

If you need hands on keyboards rather than guidance, see dedicated teams or SaaS product engineering.

Problems we solve

Architecture decided by accident. Early choices about tenancy, data model, authentication and billing shape a product for years. We review the architecture against where the business is going, not only where it is, and write down the decisions with their trade-offs.

Code you cannot judge. If you cannot read the code, you cannot tell whether a slow release is a hard problem or a weak team. Our code reviews cover structure, tests, security, dependencies and delivery practice, and the findings are written so a founder can act on them.

A roadmap without engineering reality. Roadmaps written by sales or by hope lead to missed dates. We help you build one that sequences work by dependency and risk, with honest estimates and a clear line between what is committed and what is aspirational.

Hiring the wrong engineer. The first senior hire sets the standard for everyone after. We write the job description, design the technical interview and the paid trial task, sit in on interviews and give you a clear recommendation.

Build-versus-buy with no good answer. Payments, auth, search, analytics, AI features: each can be built or bought. We cost both paths against your constraints and tell you which one we would choose and why.

Due diligence under time pressure. Investors and acquirers ask hard questions about the codebase. We run technical due diligence on your own product before they do, or on a target you are considering, and deliver a written report of risks, costs and quick wins.

How we approach it

The same four steps as every Shikinox engagement, shaped for advisory work.

Discover. A free call about your product, your team and what you need to decide. Within 48 hours you get a written scope: what we will review, what you will receive and how we will work together.

Design. Most engagements start with a review: repositories, infrastructure, data model, CI, security posture and running costs. You get written findings ranked by risk, each with a recommended fix and an estimate of effort, so you can decide what to do and in what order.

Build. From there the work is ongoing. On a retainer that means regular architecture and code reviews, roadmap sessions, hiring support and a standing line to our founder. On an hourly basis it means a decision when you need one. Either way you get written notes after every session, so the reasoning is kept, not just the conclusion.

Scale. When you hire a full-time CTO, we help you find them and hand over the context, the decision log and the open risks. If a review identifies work that needs doing, a dedicated team or a fixed-scope project can pick it up.

What fractional CTO services look like week to week

A typical week on retainer includes a review of the pull requests that matter, a session with your engineers or your vendor, a written note on anything that needs a decision, and a reply within 24 hours to whatever came up in between. You set the agenda; we keep the technical record straight.

What we build with

Advisory is not about imposing a stack. It is about giving opinions on tools we have run in production and saying so when something is outside our experience. Our founder has shipped with TypeScript across React, Next.js, React Native and Node.js, with PostgreSQL and Drizzle for data, Stripe for billing, Docker and GitHub Actions for delivery, Azure for hosting (AWS where a client already runs there) and Playwright for end-to-end tests. For AI features, the studio runs OpenAI and Azure AI models in production. If your product runs on something else, we will tell you how far our judgement extends and bring in a specialist for the rest.

A project our founder has led

Our founder is lead developer on a tenant screening and property management SaaS in Canada, where every property company runs as an isolated tenant on its own domain. The architecture decisions on that platform are the kind we help clients make: hostname-based multi-tenancy, four role-based portals with RBAC, session auth with Google and GitHub OAuth plus TOTP two-factor, 6+ screening providers merged into one automated PDF report with provider fallback, Stripe usage-based billing with spend limits and automatic top-ups, BullMQ background workers, a 59-table Drizzle schema with versioned migrations, and Dockerised CI/CD to Azure with Vitest and Playwright suites. Results from projects our founder has led include 20% lower API latency through query tuning and caching and 25% faster page loads through SSR and CDN work.

What you get

• An NDA signed before you share any details, including repository access.
• Full ownership of every review, report, decision log and any code we write, delivered into your repositories.
• Written findings from every review, and weekly demos of anything we build.
• A written scope within 48 hours of the first call.
• A reply within 24 hours, every time.
• A start in 1 to 2 weeks, sooner for a single decision.

Advisory is a custom quote, on retainer or hourly; see ways to work with us and who you will be working with. If you have a decision to make or a codebase you want a second opinion on, book advisory and we will reply within 24 hours.