Fractional CTOs and embedded squads for founders shipping AI products on a runway clock. We've taken systems from zero to billion-scale — and watched plenty of AI startups die in between. We know which mistake you're about to make.
Six patterns we keep walking into on scoping calls. Nobody we meet is running just one at a time.
A working notebook is not a product. Most teams underestimate the gap by six months and a full rewrite.
A clever prompt is a feature, not a company. If your product dies when the next model lands, you don't have one.
Kubernetes, microservices, and a nine-person platform team for two hundred users. The architecture is louder than the traction.
Fast commits, fragile systems. Six months of speed, then a quarter of paying it back — usually during your raise.
Cursor and Claude can write a lot of code. Neither asks whether the system should exist.
Founders who start managing engineers stop talking to customers. Six months later the product ships and the pipeline is empty.
Pick the smallest engagement that solves your bottleneck. About one in four scoping calls ends with us telling you not to hire us.
For founders who need engineering judgment in the room — hiring, architecture, vendor decisions, board materials — but don't yet need a full-time hire.
For teams shipping a product or platform that needs to move from prototype to load-bearing. We bring a small, calibrated pod — staff lead plus 2–3 senior engineers — and ramp out as you hire.
Every one of our partners has shipped AI products and adopted AI workflows on real teams. We bring both halves of the conversation — the one about your customers, and the one about your engineers.
Roll out Claude, Copilot, Cursor — and the policies, eval rubrics, and prompt libraries that make them stick beyond the first month.
RAG, agents, evals, fine-tuning. We have the scar tissue from production deployments — what is theater, what is a feature, and what is a company.
Write the playbook for your team: when to reach for an LLM, when not to, how to review AI-authored code, and how to measure leverage.
Model selection, vendor lock-in, eval harness, cost ceilings. We benchmark your current stack against the alternatives you should have considered.
Most engineering firms target enterprise budgets. We optimize for the moments where one architecture decision changes your next two years.
Usually too early. Hire a builder.
Fractional CTO + maybe a 2-person squad.
Embedded squad for one workstream, CTO advisory.
Squad for a specific platform investment.
Strategic engagement: audit, write-up, hand-off.
Targeted intervention; we know the playbook.
Engagements run on a public clock. Every step has a deliverable that you'd be happy to show your board.
A 90-minute working session to map your bottleneck, your runway, and the smallest engagement that moves the needle.
We propose a named lead (and squad, if applicable) with the specific scar tissue your problem needs. You meet them before you sign.
Production-ready from day one. CI, observability, on-call, and a paved-road template you keep when we leave.
Weekly demo + written changelog. Quarterly architecture review. Hiring partner cadence baked in so you can replace us on schedule.
Our success metric is leaving cleanly. Runbooks, ADRs, hired engineers in seat — and a final review you'd ship to your board.
Every decision lives in an ADR you and your future hires can read. Code is yours from commit zero — no exit clauses, no rented people.
From week one we plan our exit. Hiring is part of the engagement; we screen, level, and onboard the full-timers who replace us.
What we know about scaling — schema migrations, on-call rotations, vendor lock-in, fraud, compliance — comes free with the engagement.
We pick the dullest stack that fits the next two years. Excitement is debt with a different name.
If we can't describe the on-call shape, we don't know the design well enough to build it.
No collective ambiguity. Every running thing has a named human who paged for it last.
CI, observability, and a deploy pipeline are scaffolding — not a milestone you graduate to.
Architecture and team shape are the same problem. We design both at once.
Every consequential call is an ADR. Future you, your hires, and your acquirer will read these.
Toptal is a marketplace — they hand you a contractor and step back. Dev shops sell hours. We sell outcomes against a stage-specific playbook, with a named lead who's seen the same problem in three other startups. We also leave — every engagement plans the replacement hire from week one.
You leave with a written diagnosis and a recommendation — whether or not it involves us. We will tell you exactly which of the six failure modes you're closest to.