Fractional CTO & Technical Leadership
Experienced technical leadership, a few days a week, from someone who still writes code.
Many companies need senior technical judgement long before they can justify a full-time CTO, or during a gap between leaders. DeltaBreen provides that leadership on a part-time basis: setting direction, making the architecture and platform calls, building the engineering practice, and staying close enough to the code to know whether it is working.
What the role covers
- Technical strategy: A roadmap that matches the business plan and the budget, revisited as both change.
- Architecture decisions: Build versus buy, platform choices, and the trade-offs explained in terms the board understands.
- Engineering practice: Code review, testing, CI/CD, incident handling and documentation established as habits, not policies.
- Hiring and vendors: Interviewing engineers, structuring the team, and managing outside agencies on your behalf.
- Board and investor support: Technical input for fundraising, due diligence and reporting.
Who it suits
- Scale-ups: The founding team can no longer carry every technical decision alone.
- Established businesses: Software has become critical to operations but there is no senior technical voice in the room.
- Leadership gaps: An interim to hold direction and the team together while you hire.
How it works
- Assess
The first weeks are a review of systems, team and delivery, ending in a written plan you can act on with or without us.
- Lead
A regular weekly commitment, on-site or remote, with clear responsibilities agreed up front.
- Transition
When a permanent hire arrives, we help recruit them and hand over cleanly.
Common questions
- How much time is involved?
- Commonly one to two days a week. It scales up for a specific push, such as a platform migration or a funding round, and down once the team is running well.
- Do you also do the engineering work?
- Where it helps, yes. A fractional CTO who cannot unblock the team by getting into the code is of limited use.
- Is this remote or on-site?
- Both. Remote across European, UK and US time zones, with on-site time in Ireland and Europe as needed.