Fractional CTO
I'm a fractional CTO who has built products from zero inside early-stage startups, and I know what to fix when a running team stops delivering. If you have a team in place, we start with a 2 to 4 week de-risk audit.
45 minutes. No fee, no commitment. We find out if there's a real conversation to have.
Alex Raihelgaus
Fractional CTO
You have an idea or early traction and a small team, or no team yet. I've been the technical weight in several early-stage startups, from the first architecture decisions through the first hires, the first release, and the first customers. I help you decide what to build first, what to buy, what to delay, and who to hire, so the product you launch keeps moving after launch.
Engineering shipped fast at the start. Then roadmaps began to slip, new hires took six months to become useful, and bug rates climbed. Founders in this spot often can't tell whether the cause is people, process, architecture, or strategy. The de-risk audit answers that.
You run a business where software is a lever, not the thing you sell. The decisions still land on your desk: what to build, what to buy, which vendor to trust, where AI helps, when to hire your first technical person. I give management a technical peer at the table for those calls, then make sure they get executed.
Worked across fintech, healthcare, cybersecurity, ecommerce, B2B SaaS, web3, mobility, AI, and ad-tech.
A fractional CTO gives you senior technical leadership without a full-time executive hire. I work as a co-pilot to the CEO: translating business goals into technical priorities, setting direction for the team, and making sure what engineering ships is what the business needs.
My background covers the business side as much as the engineering side:
2 to 4 weeks. Fixed fee.
I spend the first weeks inside your engineering org. I talk with leadership and stakeholders, work alongside your developers, read pull requests, and sit in the meetings where decisions get made. I look at how the team uses AI, how work moves from idea to production, and whether engineering, product, and the business pull in the same direction.
Regular working sessions with you, technical direction and decisions on call, and review of the work that matters. You keep your team and your structure, and the calls get sharper.
I take on technical leadership as your fractional CTO: setting priorities, working with the team week to week, owning the technical roadmap, and helping you hire.
Scope is set together after the audit or the first conversation.
Eleven of them shown above. The full list is longer.
Opinions, field notes, and the occasional argument with myself.
Your team is busy. Nothing ships. The fix isn't a better stack, a faster build, or one more standup. It's the translation layer between business need and technical execution - and almost nobody is actually working on it.
Why throwing prompts at ChatGPT doesn't make your team better, and how applying engineering discipline to AI-assisted development actually does.
The cheapest token is the one you never spend. If you're re-prompting an LLM to do the same deterministic task over and over, you're paying for work you already solved. Use the model once to write the script-then run the script for free.
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Building something new, or watching a busy team miss the roadmap? That's the conversation I want.
45 minutes to see if there's a real engagement here.