CTO-leveladvisoryforEdTechfounderswithoutafull-timeCTO.
Fractional CTO and technical advisory engagements covering architecture decisions, engineering hiring, technology strategy, and crisis support. Weekly cadence. Hands-on. Founders use us until they hire the full-time CTO they actually need.
Daily active users
Peak requests per minute
Products shipped
Downtime through migrations
Platforms at three inflection points.
Non-technical founder, early team
- Who
- Founders with a strong product/market vision but no engineering background, building their first technical product.
- Problem
- The team needs senior engineering judgment to avoid expensive early architectural mistakes, but cannot afford or attract a full-time CTO yet.
- What we do
- Fractional CTO involvement: weekly check-ins, decision support on major technical choices, hiring rubric, vendor selection.
Funded startup between CTOs
- Who
- Companies whose CTO has left or is leaving, with a CTO search in progress that will take 6-12 months.
- Problem
- The engineering team needs leadership coverage during the gap. Without it, decisions defer or default to whoever is loudest.
- What we do
- Interim CTO coverage: technical decision authority, engineering management oversight, executive-team representation, cohesion through the transition.
Specialized expertise gap
- Who
- Companies with strong general engineering leadership but missing depth in a specific area like multi-tenant architecture, real-time systems, or scaling past 100K DAU.
- Problem
- The team can build but has not done THIS specific kind of build before.
- What we do
- Topic-specific advisory engagement focused on the area of depth, usually 3-6 months around a specific architectural project.
Where platforms break. And how we rebuild them.
Engineering decisions deferred indefinitely
The pain: Without a senior decision-maker, every architectural choice gets debated for weeks and never resolved. Ship dates slip.
Our approach: Advisory provides decision authority on major technical choices. Either we decide, or we facilitate a decision the team can rally behind. No more endless RFC threads.
Hiring senior engineers without senior engineers to evaluate them
The pain: Founder cannot evaluate the technical quality of senior candidates. Hires miss. Either too junior for the work or culturally bad fits for the team.
Our approach: Hiring rubric design, interview question set, and live participation in senior-engineer interviews. The first 5-10 senior hires are particularly important, getting them right sets the engineering culture for years.
Roadmap commitments engineering cannot deliver
The pain: Sales or product commits to features the engineering team cannot ship in the promised timeframe. Trust erodes between functions.
Our approach: Roadmap pressure-testing before commitments are made. Honest capacity estimation. Re-scoping when commitments and capacity diverge, early enough that nobody loses face.
Vendor and stack lock-in by accident
The pain: Decisions made early, database choice, cloud provider, key vendors, turn out to be wrong but are too entrenched to undo cheaply.
Our approach: Stack and vendor selection support based on where the platform is going, not just where it is today. Proactive identification of lock-in risks before they become expensive.
Methodology tuned for platforms at scale.
- 01
Discovery (weeks 1-3)
Understand the company, the team, the product, and the technical landscape. Map current architecture and team structure. Identify the most pressing decisions on the table. Establish a working cadence with the founder and engineering leads.
- 02
Active advisory (ongoing)
Weekly working session with engineering leadership. Async availability for specific decisions during the week. Participation in critical interviews. Architecture review on major proposals. Crisis support on outages or scaling events.
- 03
Strategic checkpoints (quarterly)
Quarterly review of the engineering function. Roadmap pressure-test. Hiring plan validation. Vendor cost and risk review. Documented decision log of what was decided and why.
- 04
Transition planning (months 6-12)
Most advisory engagements have an end goal, typically the company hiring its full-time CTO. We help structure the search, evaluate candidates, and hand off cleanly so the new CTO inherits a known context.
250,000+ daily users. Multi-tenant by design.
Our multi-tenant EdTech platform powers white-label brands including Your CA Buddy and Youth Pathshala. It holds 250,000+ daily active users, 10 million requests per minute at peak, and has sustained zero downtime through three major scaling migrations. Every pattern on this page, the architecture, the decisions, the approach, has been battle-tested there first.
READ THE PLATFORM STORYHow the platform scaled from 20K to 250K daily active users over 3 years.Read case study →Questions founders ask about this.
When does a founder need a fractional CTO instead of a full-time hire?+
When the engineering team is small (under 10), the founder is non-technical, and a senior CTO would be either too expensive to hire full-time or impossible to recruit at the company's current stage. Fractional CTO bridges that gap until the company can attract and afford a full-time engineering leader.
What does ongoing technical advisory actually cover?+
Architecture decisions on net-new systems and major refactors. Engineering hiring rubric and interview design. Technology selection (stack, vendors, cloud). Roadmap pressure-testing, does the eng team have the capacity for what is being committed externally? Crisis support during outages or scaling events.
How is this different from board-advisor or angel involvement?+
Hands-on. Board advisors give strategic input quarterly. We are involved weekly in actual technical decisions: reviewing architecture proposals, sitting in on critical engineering interviews, advising on vendor selection, helping the team navigate specific scaling problems as they happen.
What seniority level shows up to advisory engagements?+
CTO-level. Engineers who have built and scaled platforms past 100,000 daily active users and shipped systems to enterprise buyers. Not 'former engineer who consults now', currently active engineers running real production systems.
Can advisory transition into hands-on engineering?+
Yes, most do. The advisory phase establishes context. When the team needs hands-on capacity for a specific project, the same people who have been advising can scope a pod or partnership engagement against a known foundation. No re-onboarding cost.