Fractional CTO

The organization is an engineering-focused startup operating a platform that ranks creators using a proprietary momentum scoring system. The product is functionally complete but technically fragile—crashing frequently and largely built through informal development practices and ad‑hoc AI patches. The company is preparing for growth and investor conversations and seeks a fractional CTO to evaluate the existing codebase, harden production, stress-test architecture and data, and provide senior technical credibility for fundraising and launch readiness.

Responsibilities

• Inherit and perform a rapid, comprehensive technical review of the codebase, architecture, data layer, and deployment pipelines.
• Identify critical gaps, single points of failure, and security or data integrity risks; deliver a prioritized remediation plan.
• Harden the production environment: stabilize deployments, reduce crashes, and implement robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
• Stress-test architecture and data flows for scale and investor scrutiny; validate the proprietary scoring pipeline.
• Establish immediate stability improvements and a short-term roadmap to support growth and launch readiness.
• Prepare and present technical slides and talking points to support investor conversations and due diligence.
• Mentor and elevate the existing engineering team; introduce engineering best practices, documentation, and code review standards.
• Coordinate with founders and stakeholders to align technical priorities with business objectives and fundraising timelines.
• Oversee integrations with external data sources, AI-driven components, and third-party services as needed.

Qualifications

• Proven senior technical leader with strong product and architecture oversight; experience acting as a CTO, including fractional or part-time engagements.
• Zero-to-one experience: building or scaling early-stage products from prototype to production.
• Demonstrated experience supporting fundraising rounds, technical diligence for investors, or serving as a credible technical lead on investor materials.
• Strong hands-on experience with modern front-end frameworks and backend API architectures.
• Experience with managed Postgres/BaaS solutions, cloud deployments, and infrastructure for production web services.
• Competency with data engineering, analytics pipelines, and validating proprietary scoring or data systems.
• Familiarity with AI agent infrastructure and integrating AI-driven components into production systems.
• SRE and production stability skills: monitoring, observability, incident response, and performance tuning.
• Excellent communication skills to translate technical tradeoffs to non-technical founders and investors.
• Comfortable with a remote, part-time engagement (~5–10 hours/week) and able to start within the coming month.
• Experience in entertainment, creator, or consumer products is preferred but not required.