A senior CTO in the room, without the salary or the equity
Architecture calls, technical hiring, vendor oversight, and due-diligence prep — on a part-time retainer. For founders who don't have a technical co-founder and can't yet justify a full-time C-level hire. We complement a future CTO; we don't pretend to replace one.
You're probably reading this if…
- You're a non-technical founder making six-figure engineering decisions on instinct, and nobody at the table can tell you whether the answers you're getting are right.
- Your technical co-founder left, and the codebase, the cloud accounts, and the roadmap walked out the door with them.
- You're pre-Series-A and an investor mentioned 'technical due diligence' — and you have no idea whether your architecture survives a second opinion.
- You're paying an external dev agency every month and have no honest way to evaluate whether their work, estimates, or invoices are reasonable.
The breakage we see most
These are the patterns that show up on first calls. If you're seeing 1+ of these, an architecture audit will save you weeks.
No one to vet your technical hires
You're interviewing senior engineers you can't technically assess. We run the screens, set the bar, and tell you which candidate is actually senior versus senior-on-LinkedIn.
An agency running unchecked
Your dev shop sets the scope, the timeline, and the price, and grades its own homework. We sit on your side of the table: review their PRs, sanity-check estimates, and hold them to a spec.
Architecture decisions made by juniors
The biggest call in the codebase was made by whoever was free that sprint. We own the decisions that are expensive to reverse — data model, auth, tenancy, build-vs-buy — and document the why.
Investor tech due-diligence looming
A diligence team is about to read your repo, your infra, and your security posture cold. We get the architecture, docs, and access controls into a state that survives that review before the data room opens.
A cloud bill nobody can explain
Spend is climbing and no one can map line items to features. We find the idle instances, the over-provisioned tiers, and the runaway egress, then put guardrails on so it doesn't creep back.
No roadmap, just a backlog
Engineering is shipping tickets with no through-line to the business. We translate company goals into a sequenced technical roadmap with real tradeoffs, not a wishlist sorted by loudest voice.
The exact deliverables on a typical engagement
Architecture ownership
We own the decisions that are costly to undo — data modelling, service boundaries, multi-tenancy, auth, build-vs-buy — and leave behind written decision records, not tribal knowledge.
Technical hiring & team design
Role definitions, scorecards, screening, and final-round technical interviews. We help you design the org — who to hire first, what to outsource, and when to stop relying on us.
Agency & vendor oversight
We review your external team's code, estimates, contracts, and delivery. You get an honest, independent read on whether you're getting what you pay for — and leverage when you're not.
Security & compliance posture
Threat modelling, access reviews, secrets handling, and a pragmatic path toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / DPDP readiness sized to your stage — not enterprise theatre you don't need yet.
Cloud cost control
A line-by-line read of AWS/GCP spend, right-sizing, reserved-capacity strategy, and budget alerts. We turn an unexplained bill into a number you can forecast and defend to a board.
Investor due-diligence prep
We get your architecture diagrams, code health, infrastructure, and security controls into a state that holds up under a diligence team's questions, and prep you for the technical conversation.
Technical roadmap
A sequenced, honest roadmap that ties engineering effort to business outcomes, surfaces the real tradeoffs, and gives you and your board a credible plan for the next two to four quarters.
Tools we typically reach for
Projects in this space
Questions teams ask before starting
Ready to stop wondering?
Free 30-min architecture audit. We'll send a written 1-page review of your idea or system within 48 hours.
Book a 30-min Architecture Audit