Outsourced technical director for startups, scale-ups, and SMBs that need senior technical leadership without hiring a full-time CTO. I handle architecture decisions, roadmap management, and dev team leadership.
A CTO is not a senior developer who codes a lot. Their role is strategic and organizational: choosing the right technologies, structuring the team, managing technical debt, and aligning IT with business objectives.
Technology option evaluation, documented trade-offs, reversible vs irreversible decisions, ADR (Architecture Decision Records).
Prioritizing technical workstreams, balancing debt and new features, communicating to product and board.
Setting up code review processes, defining standards, technical evaluation of candidates, team upskilling.
Assessment of existing systems, identifying critical risks, prioritized remediation plan, missing architecture documentation.
You have an MVP but no in-house technical leadership. The freelance CTO structures the initial IT, chooses tools, and frames future hires.
The team grows quickly, technical debt accumulates, deliveries slow down. Order needs to be restored without stopping everything.
Your CTO is leaving. You need a senior profile while recruiting or restructuring. A freelance CTO ensures continuity without rushing a strategic hire.
A contractor or internal team without structure. The product exists but no one holds the technical helm. High risk to maintainability and security.
Complete overhaul of an aging monolithic system. Migration to a Laravel microservices architecture on AWS. Building and managing a team of 6 developers. Implementing full CI/CD with automated testing.
3-week audit of a Laravel SaaS application with 50k users. Identification of 12 critical risks (security, scalability, maintainability). Delivery of a 6-month prioritized remediation plan.
Coaching a team of 4 junior/mid developers: weekly code reviews, standard-setting, architecture of new features, onboarding of new hires. 2 days/week over 8 months.
The Tech Lead is rooted in code: they arbitrate technical decisions at the team level, do reviews, choose patterns. The CTO has a broader scope: they engage with the board, choose the global technology direction, recruit, manage the tech budget, and ensure alignment between IT and business strategy. In practice, in the engagements I take on, the two roles often overlap.
I adapt to the need. Some clients need 2 days/week for a fractional CTO role. Others need 5 days for an urgent transition or launch. We define this together on the first call.
Both. A CTO without the ability to lead a team is just an architect. I can handle technical interviews, seniority level definitions, one-on-ones, and upskilling. Technology alone isn't enough: what holds a product together is a structured team.
Low-risk first step
Start with a 10-day audit. I review your codebase, identify critical blockers, and deliver a concrete action plan — before any long-term commitment.
Discover the Audit & RescueAvailable part-time or full-time. Remote or hybrid from Nice.
This checklist comes from real missions. Every point is a signal I've observed in a real team, before an intervention turned things around.