Fractional CTO. Technology leadership, part time.
Your product is live. Your team is shipping. Nobody senior owns the technology. I do that job part time.
Twenty years leading engineering teams, the last five as CTO of a vertical SaaS platform. Uptime went from 98% to 99.95%. Deploys went from four hours to fifteen minutes. I still write code.
I shipped that company’s first production AI assistant, and I run my own business on 34 AI agents today. When I tell you where AI and automation will save your team money, it is from running it.
Start with a free written review of what I would fix first.
One ask: a free written review of your engineering and AI setup. What I would fix first, what I would leave alone, and where AI would actually save money. Written, and yours to keep.
What I did as CTO of a vertical SaaS platform, 2021 to 2026.
It served about 2,200 auto repair shops, with multiple users per shop, and I owned the complete platform: customer-facing features, internal operational tools and external partner integrations. I modernized substantial parts of a monolith into event-driven services, led zero-downtime PHP 8, MySQL 8 and AWS migrations, took PHPUnit coverage from 3% to 38%, and cut HTTP 500 errors by about 85%.
- 98% to 99.95%
- Platform uptime
- 6 hrs to under 10 min
- Mean time to recovery
- 4 hrs to 15 min
- Deployment time
- $3M
- Annual technology and engineering spend
- 12+
- Engineers led, while still writing production code
- $800K to $6M
- Company revenue during my tenure
- SOC 2 Type II and PCI-DSS
- Readiness led through successful validation
- First production AI
- The parent company’s first production AI writing assistant, from first implementation to rollout across multiple portfolio companies
Earlier I led a 30-person onshore and offshore technology organization at a digital marketing agency, and an offshore Agile team of more than 20 at a performance marketing company. Before that I founded and ran a development studio that delivered more than 200 web and mobile projects. More than 20 years in software, and I still write production code.
What a month with me actually looks like.
For companies with a product in production and a team that needs an experienced technical leader: a founder without a technical cofounder, a team whose CTO is stretched across too much, or a company deciding what to do about AI before it spends money on the wrong thing.
Twenty hours a month, every month, as a working member of your team rather than an advisor who sends notes. Here is where those hours go.
- 01
A weekly call with your engineering team
Every week, with the people who ship. Priorities, blockers, and the decisions that have been waiting on a technical leader to make them.
- 02
Inside your architecture and code review
I read the code and the design docs and I review real pull requests. My opinions come from your system, not from a template.
- 03
A written plan every month
One document: what to fix first, what to leave alone, and where AI pays for itself instead of quietly adding cost. It is yours, and it says what changed since the last one.
- 04
On call when something breaks
When production breaks, you call me and we work it. That is how my team took recovery time from six hours to under ten minutes.
All four of the above, every month, for a small number of companies at a time. No scoping call, no discovery phase, no minimum term. If it is not earning its keep, stop it.
$6,000 a month for 40 hours, only if you ask for it.
If your company needs a full-time technology leader rather than part of one, I am open to the right seat. Remote across the US, or in San Diego. Same record, same person, every day.
The free written review is one month’s plan, done once, for free.
It is the same document you would get every month, written from whatever you are comfortable showing me: what I would fix first, what I would leave alone, and where AI would actually save money. Yours to keep whether or not we work together. If you like how it reads, the engagement above is that, every month, plus the call, the code review and the phone when production breaks.
Start with a free written review of your engineering and AI setup.
What I would fix first, what I would leave alone, and where AI would actually save money. I write it from whatever you are comfortable sharing, and it is yours to keep whether or not we work together.
It is one month’s plan, done once, for free. If you want that every month, plus the weekly call, the code review and the phone when production breaks, that is $4,000 a month for 20 hours. Book the review below. If you would rather talk first, the same link works for that.
Request the free written review →Brian Robison · San Diego · Remote across the US