Fractional CTO for AI Startups — Senior Technical Leadership, Remote

In the first two weeks I audit what exists — codebase, data, infrastructure, costs, team — and write down the target architecture and the ordered list of things to fix or build. From there the role is steady: architecture and technical roadmap ownership, daily code and PR reviews, sprint planning with your product lead, engineer mentoring and pairing, take-home design and interviews when you hire, vendor and model-provider negotiation, and a written record of every significant decision so the next engineer understands why.

AI startups have a few decisions that are specific to them and I spend a lot of my time on those: model selection and routing across OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Groq and open models; whether retrieval or fine-tuning is right; how to evaluate quality so releases do not silently regress; how to keep API costs from eating gross margin; and what data you must collect now to have any moat in a year.

US fractional CTOs charge $8,000-12,000 a month for 15-20 hours a week, and $150-500 an hour for shorter work. My embedded engagement is 20 hours a week for four weeks at $4,999, renewable month to month, with two weeks of post-engagement support included. It is deliberately priced so that a pre-seed or seed-stage startup can afford senior technical leadership before it can afford a full-time CTO salary or the equity a technical co-founder would want.

Two smaller engagements sit in front of it. The AI strategy session is $299: ninety minutes to pressure-test your idea, architecture or vendor choice, followed by a written action plan with priorities and a running-cost estimate. The AI readiness audit is $1,499 over two weeks: four working sessions, an audit of your product, data and team, use cases ranked by value and feasibility, a target architecture, build-versus-buy calls, a throwaway prototype of the top use case, and a budgeted 90-day roadmap.

You probably need one if you are a non-technical founder with an outsourced team and no one checking their work; if you have raised money and are about to make hiring or platform decisions you cannot judge; if investors or enterprise customers are asking technical due-diligence questions; or if the product works in demos but keeps breaking in production. You probably do not need one yet if you have no product and no users — a strategy session and a well-scoped MVP will get you further for less.

A fractional CTO also does not replace a technical co-founder forever. Part of my job is to define the role, help you hire the person who will own it full-time, and hand over cleanly. Several engagements end with me interviewing my own replacement, which is the right outcome.

I work in UTC+6. For a UK or EU startup that means I am online for your whole afternoon; for a US startup, your morning and evening. We agree a fixed weekly rhythm — a planning call, a review call and a standing office-hours slot inside the overlap — and I do the review, design and writing work asynchronously so your team is never blocked on my time zone. I use your tools: GitHub, Linear or Jira, Slack, Notion, whatever you already run.

Everything is under NDA, I hold no equity unless we agree otherwise, and all documentation, decision records and code produced during the engagement belong to you. Hiring a fractional CTO from Bangladesh directly, rather than through a platform, also means no placement fee and a contract in your company's name.

I have built and shipped AI products end to end — a multi-tenant AI voice coaching platform, a multi-model content SaaS, an AI screening tool with subscription billing, and the MVPs of several founder-led companies — on Next.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL, React Native and the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs. I understand the founders' side because I run a small product business myself. Book a free 30-minute call and tell me where the company is; I will tell you honestly whether you need a fractional CTO, an audit, or just a good developer.