Fractional CTO for small teams | Manager & Director Coaching | Hands-on Product Engineering
Helping teams improve culture, execution, and technical direction when progress stalls or targets start slipping.
Bio
A lot of engineering problems get framed as tooling, process, or architecture issues. Often, they are really a mix of culture, execution, and technical direction.
They show up as missed targets, slow delivery, unclear ownership, uneven quality, or teams that are working hard without enough forward motion.
Through Nate-Land Studios, I help teams untangle those issues and make practical progress.
I offer fractional CTO support for small teams, coaching for managers and directors, and hands-on product engineering for high-leverage work that still needs real technical execution.
My background includes scaling distributed organizations, building high-performance cultures, and delivering production-ready platforms with more predictable execution. I’ve led multi-disciplinary teams across the U.S., Canada, LatAm, and India, owned budgets and vendor strategy, and partnered closely with Product, UX, Data, PMO, GTM, and Customer Success.
I work best with teams that are trying to grow, get unstuck, or improve how they operate. Sometimes that means strengthening culture and accountability. Sometimes it means clarifying technical direction. Usually it means both.
I built this project from the ground up to help teams surface the best ideas. This involved the planning, coding, deployment, monitoring, and user experience.
I help teams ship reliably, at the pace the market demands, at the quality the product requires. I build the culture that sustains it and I write the code that proves it. Architecture, coaching, delivery. I translate between business goals and technical execution, from org design and team coaching
Built a cross-platform gym timer for serious athletes using Kotlin Multiplatform and AI-assisted development workflows. I created it in part to stay close to how modern product engineering is changing in practice, not just in theory.
Expressway Tech is the backoffice toolkit that restaurants need. Inventory planning, scheduling, and analytics are all the tools needed for a restaurant after they close a ticket, to be ready for the next one.
Planned out a full stack rewrite of the system
Executed the foundation layers to ensure we are setup for success
Worked strategically on integrating ML and AI into future product roadmaps
Coach internal devs, and proposed a new team organization in an agentic software world.
Apr 2026 — Jul 2026
ST
Smart Tag
Fractional CTO
Smart Tag helps students safely get to and from school. This involves a custom driver app, a parent app, routing software as well as the infrastructure to help with bus and fleet management
Leading security and SDLC efforts to get the team a SOC Audit
Lead recruitment efforts of a full RTO team
Transitioned ownership of 20 year tech leadership to myself in < 4 weeks
Onboarded as a developer myself to respond to production incidents due to team attrition
Leading agentic coding practices to help level up the engineering team.
Apr 2022 — Nov 2025
FranklinCovey
Head Of Engineering
FranklinCovey is a leadership development company undergoing a strategic shift toward becoming more technology-driven.
Scaled engineering from 9 to 25 across the U.S., Canada, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and other regions
Led technical due diligence for an acquisition and integrated developers with 0% attrition while achieving >10% budget savings and increasing velocity
Guided AI transformation through vendor evaluation, internal enablement, and delivery improvements without sacrificing quality
Improved roadmap execution, delivery cadence, and cross-team operating consistency
Balanced leadership with hands-on contributions in prototyping, build systems, and developer productivity work
Nov 2015 — May 2022
PowerSchool (via acquisition of Schoology)
Senior Director / Director / Engineering Manager
Schoology is a mission-critical Learning Management System used daily by millions of teachers
and students.
Led engineering organizations from team level through senior director scope, culminating in a ~50-person org across mobile, backend, frontend, data, architecture, and cloud operations
Owned uptime, roadmap predictability, retention, and a roughly $10M annual budget across people, vendors, and cloud hosting
Built and optimized distributed teams across North and South America and India
Mentored and promoted 5 ICs into management through structured coaching and career development
Stayed close to the work through architecture oversight, technical reviews, and support for major platform efforts including Kubernetes migration
Improved development productivity, accelerated feature delivery, and helped launch product work that materially increased adoption
Jan 1999 — Jan 2015
SA
Spredfast, Allen Technologies, eBay, Works, rightshop.net
Ranged from IC to Team Lead
Built the technical foundation for my current work through software architecture, platform engineering, performance and reliability improvements, integrations, data systems, and early team leadership across consumer, healthcare, finance, and enterprise software environments.
Jan 1998 — May 1999
University of Pittsburgh
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
The University of Pittsburgh is a prestigious research university dedicated to academic excellence and innovation.
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