TypeScript Developer
for SaaS

The fractional CTO's technology philosophy centers on boring, proven technology... not because innovation is bad, but because startups fail from product-market fit problems, not technology choices. Every hour spent debugging an exotic framework is an hour not spent talking to customers. The technology recommendations are intentionally conservative: Next.js 15 on Vercel because it's well-documented and engineers are available; PostgreSQL on Neon or RDS because it handles everything a startup needs through Series B; Clerk or Auth.js for authentication because rolling your own is how breach post-mortems start; Stripe for billing because no investor will fund a payments rebuild. Managed platforms carry their premium for a reason... DevOps shouldn't be a startup's competitive advantage pre-product-market-fit. The engagement model matters as much as the technology advice. A fractional CTO works 4-12 hours per week, joining team meetings, reviewing architecture decisions, and handling escalations. This cadence matches early-stage needs: big decisions happen weekly, not daily. The startup gets experienced technical leadership at 10-20% of full-time executive costs, with zero equity dilution and no 9-month executive search. That math lets founders reserve their CTO equity slot for the hire that joins after Series A, when the technical bar shifts from 'choose wisely' to 'scale the team from five to twenty.'

Fractional CTO engagements begin with a diagnostic phase. I review the current codebase, infrastructure, team structure, and business context. This produces an honest assessment: what's working, what's concerning, and what needs immediate attention versus what can wait. From there, the engagement settles into a sustainable rhythm. Weekly calls with the founder or CEO to discuss strategic technical decisions. Regular engagement with the engineering team through architecture reviews, pull request feedback, and mentoring. Quarterly roadmap alignment ensuring technology investments support business priorities. For investor preparation, I create documentation that passes technical due diligence: architecture diagrams, security practices documentation, technical roadmap aligned with business milestones, and honest assessment of technical debt with remediation plans. Hiring is where the engagement compounds. I write the job specs, screen candidates, run the technical interview loop, and calibrate leveling so the startup isn't paying senior salaries for mid-level output (or vice versa). For the first five engineering hires, I sit in on every decision interview. The operational layer gets attention early: on-call rotation, incident runbooks, a deploy pipeline that doesn't require the founder at 11PM, and observability that tells you what broke before customers do. The goal is a technology organization that works when I'm not in the room, not one that depends on me being there.