Fractional CTO
Ongoing technical leadership from the studio that builds your product — without the full-time hire, the equity negotiation, or the six-month ramp. Architecture, AI lab, ADR process, team mentorship. Mountain Time. Full US overlap.
What this covers
Not a consultant who shows up with a slide deck. Ongoing technical ownership — async-first, with regular syncs. The things that fall through the cracks once a product ships and there's no one dedicated to owning the architecture.
Every non-trivial technical decision documented, contextualized, and stored. Future hires can read the reasoning, not just the outcome. Eliminates the "why did we do it this way?" tax.
Privacy-aware routing layers, fallback chains, per-workload model policies, semantic caching — including dedicated infrastructure to run your own models when that's the right call.
Eval harnesses built from your real historical data before you ship. Not bolted on after the first incident. CI-ready, versioned, owned by your team.
LangGraph, tool use, human-in-the-loop escalation, state management. Architecture for agents that need to actually run in production — not just demos.
Technical interview design, take-home calibration, offer framing. Mentoring your engineers on system design, distributed systems patterns, and production discipline.
Impartial evaluation of infra, model providers, observability stacks, and SaaS. No referral incentives. The recommendation your team gets is the one we'd make with our own money.
How it works
We read your codebase, your infra setup, your existing docs. We interview your key engineers and product leads. We produce a written technical assessment — what's working, what's load-bearing but fragile, what needs an ADR before you hire the next person. This audit is the start of the engagement, not a sales deliverable.
Weekly architecture reviews. Available in your Slack for async questions. PR reviews on the high-stakes decisions. Regular syncs with your tech lead and senior engineers. We show up in your standups when it matters. We don't show up when it doesn't.
Every decision gets documented. Every recommendation comes with rationale, alternatives considered, and the risks of the path not taken. Your team owns the architecture — not us. The ADR library, the eval harness, the runbooks: all yours.
Most engagements run 6–12 months. Some extend. Some end when you hire a full-time CTO — in which case we help you interview them, brief them, and transition properly. Either outcome is a success. We're not optimizing for contract length.
Who this is for
We work with a small number of companies at a time. Being honest about fit saves everyone time.
Engagement options
For teams that need a trusted technical voice without full ownership. Best for early-stage or as a trial before deeper engagement.
Full fractional engagement. Architecture governance, AI lab leadership, team mentorship, hiring bar. The work that actually moves the needle.
For companies building AI as a core product capability. We run your internal AI lab — prototyping, evals, routing, multi-agent design, and owned infra to serve your models.
"Systec owns the system design for our internal workflows — ADR process, service boundaries, async patterns, and data contracts. Separately runs our AI lab. It's the kind of technical leadership that's hard to replicate with a single hire at our stage."
— Engineering lead, confidential fintech platform · Ongoing engagement, 2yr+
Describe where you are and what's breaking. We'll tell you directly if it's a fit — and if not, we'll point you somewhere useful. No pitch deck. No discovery form.
Hermosillo, Sonora, MX · GMT−7 Mountain Time · Full US timezone overlap · Reply within 24 business hours.