Software Consulting
Senior engineering leadership without the full-time cost.
Not sure where to start? We provide expert technical guidance to help you make informed decisions. From architecture reviews to full CTO-as-a-service, we bring senior engineering leadership to your team.
Quick Overview
Timeline
1-52 weeks
Starting At
$3,000
Capabilities
12 core capabilities
Engagement
Free consultation
Overview
What We Do & Why It Matters
Technology decisions made early in a project's life have outsized impact on cost, speed, and quality for years to come. The architectural call you make in month three will either compound in your favor for the next five years or become the reason you need to rewrite the platform at your Series B. We have spent years helping founders, engineering leaders, and operating investors make those calls with their eyes open, and helping the teams that inherit a tangled situation find a real path forward.
Our consulting practice is built on the fact that we are practitioners, not slide-deck consultants. Every recommendation comes from hands-on experience building and scaling production systems across web, mobile, backend, AI, and e-commerce, so when we tell you that a specific architecture will fail at 50,000 users, it is because we have watched it fail at 50,000 users. When you need someone to not just recommend a plan but execute it, we can shift the same team into delivery, which is where most consulting engagements actually go to die because the advisor cannot build the thing they described.
We work across three main modes. Short-form advisory, which is architecture reviews, technical due diligence, stack selection, and vendor evaluations, typically one to four weeks. Fractional CTO or VP of Engineering engagements, where we embed part-time for three to twelve months and take on executive-level responsibility for technical strategy, hiring, and delivery. And operator-level interim engagements where a company has lost their head of engineering and needs someone to step in, stabilize, and hand over to a permanent hire. We staff each mode with an engineer senior enough to have held the role they are advising on.
Technical due diligence for investors and acquirers is one of our specialties. When a PE firm, venture investor, or strategic acquirer is evaluating a target, we can turn around a full diligence report in seven to fourteen days, covering architecture, code quality, security posture, team skill, cost efficiency, compliance readiness, and technical risk factors that would affect the deal. Our reports are written in plain language for non-technical readers, with a technical appendix for the in-house engineering team on the buyer side.
Our framework for every engagement is measurement first. We insist on putting numbers to the problem before we recommend a solution: cost per customer, deploy frequency, change failure rate, time to restore, MTTR, P95 latency, test coverage, whatever actually maps to the business question. Recommendations without baseline metrics tend to describe effort without estimating impact, and that is how good engineering time gets wasted on the wrong problems.
We are honest about when you should not work with us. We tell clients to hire in-house when they have the budget and time and the right candidate is available, because a great full-time engineering leader will always outperform a fractional consultant on long-term team building. We recommend against engagements where we cannot find a path to measurable outcomes. And we are direct when a board or founder is asking us to validate a decision that the evidence does not support. Truth has always been better for our long-term relationships than politeness.
Our consulting work is priced to match the engagement shape. Short advisory engagements are fixed-price. Fractional CTO and VP Engineering are monthly retainers aligned to committed hours per week, with a predictable budget your finance team can plan around. Interim operator engagements are monthly with a defined transition milestone. In every case you know the commitment before you sign, and you can end the engagement on thirty days notice if it is not delivering.
Capabilities
What We Deliver
Technical Architecture Reviews
A structured two to three week review of your current architecture covering system design, scalability headroom, security posture, performance bottlenecks, and maintainability risks, delivered as a written report with prioritized findings, specific recommendations, and a phased remediation roadmap with cost and timeline estimates for each item.
Technology Stack Selection
Evidence-based recommendations for languages, frameworks, databases, cloud providers, and third-party vendors, based on your team skill, performance requirements, scaling trajectory, compliance constraints, and three-year total cost of ownership. We document the trade-offs in a written decision record you can share with investors and future hires.
Fractional CTO-as-a-Service
Part-time CTO engagement at five to twenty hours per week over three to twelve months, covering technical strategy, architecture decisions, engineering hiring, vendor evaluation, investor and board technical communication, engineering culture, and delivery oversight, priced at a monthly retainer typically $8k to $25k.
Fractional VP Engineering
Part-time engineering leadership focused on delivery, team structure, process, and velocity rather than strategic technical direction. Fits companies with a technical founder who is still acting as CTO but needs help operationalizing the engineering team, at a monthly retainer typically $10k to $30k.
Technical Due Diligence for M&A and Investment
Seven to fourteen day deep-dive assessments for PE firms, venture investors, and strategic acquirers covering architecture, code quality through SonarQube and manual review, security posture through OWASP Top 10 and Snyk audits, team capability through interviews, compliance readiness, technical debt quantification, and deal-impact risk factors in a plain-language written report.
Engineering Team Structure & Hiring
Org design for engineering teams scaling from three to fifty, role definitions, level frameworks, interview loops with calibrated rubrics, technical assessments, compensation benchmarking, and hands-on interviewing support for your first three to ten engineering hires with a pass-fail quality bar.
Product Roadmap & MVP Scoping
Feature prioritization using RICE, ICE, or cost-of-delay frameworks, MVP scoping with explicit must-have versus nice-to-have separation, release planning that balances business goals with technical reality, and written roadmaps your engineering team, sales team, and board can all work from.
Legacy System Assessment & Modernization Strategy
Evaluation of legacy codebases and infrastructure with three options: a targeted refactor, a strangler-pattern incremental modernization, or in rare cases a full replatform, plus a phased plan that lets you modernize without stopping feature delivery, with cost, risk, and timeline for each option.
Vendor & SaaS Tool Evaluation
Objective comparison of SaaS tools, APIs, and platforms including CRM, payment processors, analytics, customer support, and developer tooling, with TCO analysis, integration feasibility, contractual review for data ownership and exit clauses, and a written recommendation you can defend to your board.
Pre-Investment Technical Readiness
Preparation engagements for founders raising a Series A or B: architecture documentation, tech debt triage, security posture review, SOC 2 readiness, and the pitch-deck technical slides and data-room documents your investors will ask for, so technical questions do not slow down your close.
Post-Incident Reviews & Stabilization
When your team has had a major outage, security incident, or delivery miss, we run a no-blame post-incident review, identify systemic contributing factors, and deliver a stabilization plan covering reliability engineering, process changes, and tooling improvements, often on an emergency engagement timeline.
Engineering Process & Delivery Coaching
Sprint planning, code review, CI/CD, incident response, on-call rotation, and engineering metrics coaching for teams that have outgrown their informal process but have not yet built the operational muscle, delivered as embedded coaching over four to twelve weeks.
Real Results
How We've Helped Businesses Like Yours
A Series A SaaS startup had a technical founder-CEO transitioning to a full-time CEO role and needed a CTO but could not justify a full-time hire at their stage. We ran a twelve-month fractional CTO engagement at fifteen hours per week, hired their first six engineers, shipped their Series B technical narrative, and transitioned the role to a full-time CTO we helped them recruit.
A PE firm was evaluating a $40M acquisition of a B2B SaaS company and needed technical due diligence in ten business days. We delivered a 34-page report covering architecture, code quality, security, team capability, compliance, and technical debt, with a quantified remediation cost that informed the final deal terms.
A mid-market company was running a fifteen-year-old .NET monolith that was slowing every release and scaring away engineering hires. We designed a phased strangler-pattern modernization strategy that extracted four services into modern Node.js and .NET 8 while keeping the monolith running, letting them modernize over eighteen months without halting product delivery.
A pre-seed founder with no technical background needed to validate that the technical approach their co-founder was proposing would actually scale and be investible. We ran a two-week technical review, identified three architectural choices that would need to be revisited before Series A, and produced a written memo for the investor data room that addressed them honestly.
A growth-stage startup had lost their VP of Engineering and needed interim leadership while recruiting. We placed a senior fractional VP of Engineering for six months who stabilized the team, reset the on-call rotation, defined engineering levels, hired two senior engineers, and successfully transitioned to a permanent VP of Engineering with a clean handover.
A fintech company needed a vendor evaluation for KYC and identity verification, with finalists of Persona, Alloy, and Jumio. We ran a structured eight-week evaluation including integration pilots with each vendor, TCO modeling at three-year growth projections, and a contractual review, delivering a written recommendation that saved them about $400k over the three-year term.
A venture-backed startup was losing deploys to flaky CI and uncertain ownership of infrastructure. We ran a six-week embedded engineering process engagement, set up a real CI/CD pipeline, defined on-call rotations, implemented SLO dashboards, and coached the team through the transition, taking their deploy frequency from weekly to ten per day with fewer incidents.
A founder-led SaaS was considering a rewrite of their Rails monolith. We pushed back, ran a three-week technical audit, identified that 80 percent of their perceived problems were test flakiness and deploy friction rather than architectural issues, and delivered a $180k stabilization plan instead of a projected $1.2M rewrite.
A healthtech startup needed SOC 2 Type II readiness assessment before a major enterprise deal. We ran a two-week readiness review, identified the architectural and process gaps, delivered a remediation roadmap with cost and timeline, and stayed on as advisor through the audit itself, helping them pass Type II with zero findings four months later.
A B2B SaaS company was preparing to raise Series B and needed an investor-grade technical narrative. We spent four weeks documenting the architecture, quantifying technical moat, writing the technical slides for the deck, and preparing the team for investor technical deep-dives, supporting a successful $28M round.
A marketplace startup had a technical co-founder who had written the original platform but was struggling to scale a team beyond five engineers. We provided fractional VP Engineering coaching over nine months, implemented levels, calibrated compensation, redesigned the hiring loop, and scaled the team to eighteen engineers without a major quality regression.
A regulated financial platform inherited a mature codebase through an acquisition and needed an independent technical assessment before committing to the post-acquisition integration plan. We ran a three-week review covering security, compliance, architecture, and operational readiness, delivering a phased integration plan that avoided two foreseeable incidents and accelerated their time to revenue synergy.
Technology
Our Tech Stack
Our Process
How We Work
Intake & Engagement Scoping
A focused one-hour intake call to understand your situation, goals, constraints, and decision-making timeline, followed by a written engagement proposal with scope, timeline, deliverables, and a fixed or capped price. You know what you are buying before you sign, and every engagement has a defined end point.
Deep Dive & Analysis
For advisory engagements, a structured period of code review, architecture analysis through system diagrams and data-flow documentation, team interviews with engineers at every level, quantitative measurement of delivery metrics, and document review. For CTO engagements, immersion in the team's actual work through standups, retros, and one-on-ones.
Findings, Options & Tradeoff Analysis
A clear, prioritized written report with findings organized by severity, options for each finding with pros, cons, cost, and risk, and a recommended path with the reasoning explained. We rarely present a single answer without the alternatives, because the right call depends on constraints we cannot fully see from outside.
Strategy Review & Alignment
A structured review session with your leadership team to walk through findings, answer questions, challenge assumptions, refine the plan, and lock in priorities. For board or investor audiences we tailor the presentation to the audience and join you at the meeting if needed.
Implementation Support
Ongoing advisory through weekly office hours, on-demand Slack access, and periodic check-ins to keep the plan on track, or a full delivery engagement if you want our engineering team to execute the recommended changes. Many clients start with advisory and shift into delivery when the plan is approved.
Hiring, Coaching & Team Building
For fractional CTO and VP Engineering engagements, active involvement in hiring, onboarding, level-setting, compensation, performance management, one-on-ones with senior engineers, and coaching for engineering managers, so the team grows in capability during the engagement rather than just throughput.
Knowledge Transfer & Transition Plan
Every engagement ends with documented architectural decisions, a written playbook of the processes we built, a recorded walk-through of the work, and a transition plan to either an in-house hire or continued lightweight advisory. We design for your independence from day one, not lock-in.
FAQ
Common Questions
Ready to Get Started?
Let's discuss your software consulting project. We'll review your requirements, answer your questions, and provide a clear proposal — no obligation, no pressure.
Projects starting at $3,000 · 1-52 weeks typical timeline