Fractional Technology Services for Software Companies
Six engagements, one practice. How they relate, which problem each one answers, and how to pick between them.
How the Six Fit Together
Every engagement here comes from the same place: a senior technologist who has owned the roadmap, built the information security program, designed the Azure environment, and led the migration, and who will do it for you part-time. The six services are that experience packaged three ways.
Two are ongoing leadership roles. You get a person who owns an area for a set number of days a month. Two are hands-on architecture and engineering engagements, where the deliverable is a working system rather than advice. Two are fixed-scope, where you bring a specific question and get a written answer with a defined end date.
The difference is what you need to walk away with, not which one is more senior. The same person does all six.
When You Need Someone to Own It
Fractional CTO / Technology Leadership
Technology decisions are being made by whoever is loudest, or not being made at all. The roadmap lives in people's heads. An investor or a customer asks who owns technical strategy and there isn't a clean answer. A fractional CTO engagement puts a senior leader in that seat for part of each week: roadmap ownership, build-versus-buy calls, team guidance, and an honest read on where AI adoption adds value and where it adds risk.
Fractional Cybersecurity Program Lead
A customer wants a SOC 2 report, a cyber insurance application is asking questions nobody can answer, or a security questionnaire has stalled a deal. You need an information security program, and nobody on the team has built one. I have, and it held up through four consecutive SOC 2 audits with zero findings. The security program lead engagement builds yours at a weight the company can sustain, with policies, controls, vendor oversight, and audit evidence, then keeps running it so the next questionnaire is a lookup instead of a scramble.
When You Need It Built
Fractional Azure & Application Architect
The platform runs on Azure, or is moving there, and the decisions about how it's structured are being made feature by feature. Cost climbs, resiliency is assumed rather than designed, and nobody can draw the environment on a whiteboard. I've designed these environments and led a 4TB on-premises to Azure migration with near-zero downtime. Fractional Azure architecture is hands-on design and review of the production environment and the application architecture that sits on it, with governance so it stays coherent after the engagement ends.
Application Modernization & Integrations
A .NET system that runs the business is now the thing holding it back. Upgrades are risky, integrations are brittle, and every new feature costs more than the last. Modernization and integration work takes it forward incrementally: a current runtime, cleaner boundaries, integrations with the platforms the business actually uses, and new capability where modernization alone isn't enough. No big-bang rewrite.
When You Need an Answer, Not a Person
Architecture & Migration Assessments
Leadership is debating a migration. The Azure bill keeps climbing and nobody is sure why. A proposal needs an experienced reviewer before it gets committed to. An architecture or migration assessment is a fixed-scope engagement: I review the environment or the plan, write down what I find, and hand you a prioritized set of recommendations your team can act on without me.
AI Governance
The team is using AI tools and coding agents, customers have started asking about it, and the policy is a chat message from six months ago. AI governance is a scoped engagement that extends the security program you already run to cover AI usage, coding agents, and AI-enabled integrations, written down before someone asks you to prove it.
How to Pick
Start with what you need to walk away with.
If you need a decision, start fixed-scope. An assessment or an AI governance engagement answers one question with a written deliverable and a defined end. You'll know within weeks whether there's a larger problem, and if there is, the scoping is already done.
If you need a person, start with a leadership role. A fractional CTO or a security program lead is the right call when the gap is ownership rather than information. Someone has to hold the roadmap or run the program, and it has to be someone who has done it before.
If you need it built, start with the architecture or modernization work. These are the engagements where I'm in the environment and the codebase, not just advising on them.
Engagements chain more often than not. An assessment turns into architecture work when the findings are bigger than the team can absorb. A security program adds AI governance when customers start asking about the tools. A modernization project starts with an assessment so the plan is based on what's actually there.
One scoping note. The leadership, security, and assessment engagements don't depend on your stack. The Microsoft qualifier applies to the hands-on architecture and modernization work, where I'm building rather than directing.
Not sure which one?
Describe the problem, not the service. The fit is usually clear by the end of the first conversation.
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