A fractional or interim CTO engagement that starts diagnostic: what is blocking the team, and whether what exists can scale. A proof of concept rather than a document.
For domain-expert founders who need their product out the door without a full-time CTO.
The first weeks are diagnostic: I review the architecture, work with the team, and listen to what is actually blocking them and what has already been tried. That produces two things — where the immediate benefit is, and an honest read on whether what exists can scale, stay reliable and stay maintainable. Where the plan involves real change I build a proof of concept of it rather than handing over a document, with a written review alongside if you need one. Engagements run for a contracted period and can be extended, month to month inside it, and either of us can exit if it is not working.
$15,000–$20,000/month
Up to 40 hours a month at $15,000, or 60 at $20,000. Beyond that, $350/hour — I'll tell you before we get there, not after.
A CPA firm — domain experts in tax — contracted me as fractional CTO for their live SaaS platform, under delivery pressure. An inherited 19-service, four-datastore design was re-architected into two domain-aligned services on a single datastore. The multi-intent AI assistant was specified under one governing contract for every AI output, enforced structurally rather than by prompt: deterministic engines and retrieval decide what is true, and the LLM only routes and narrates — so it could never volunteer information that had not come from retrieval or a deterministic engine. Canonical data got a single write path: every value, human or AI, enters through one gate, nothing AI-proposed lands without human confirmation, and no flow may write around it or hold a shadow copy. I led a 24-person cross-functional team under a single technical vision.
The domain-to-technical intertwining done from the founder's chair: co-founded a venture-backed AV sensor company, built and led a 15-person engineering organization across Singapore, Spain, and Germany, and drove 8× valuation growth in 24 months. Continuous Dynamic Calibration™ (published international patent application WO 2022/031226, co-inventor; the US/EP/CA national-phase filings subsequently lapsed) deployed in production autonomous vehicles and robotics — calibration cut from hours to minutes — for B2B clients whose work lives in testing and research programs, where "production-grade" is decided by other people's labs.
Clinical reality set the constraints; the AI had to serve them. Led the 8-person team whose AI-powered data-capture platform helped secure a $70M NIH grant; deployed a medical-coding AI that reached 60% adoption in its first year and cut coding time from days to hours.
What do your services cost?
Fractional / Interim CTO is $15,000/month up to 40 hours, or $20,000/month up to 60 hours; additional hours are $350/hour. Technical Consulting & POC-to-Production Advisory is $350/hr, or a $1,500/month retainer that includes four hours with overflow at the same rate. An Applied-Research Sprint is from $7,500, fixed scope and no hourly rate. A Regulated-Ready MVP starts from $10,000/project.
Applications DynamWorks builds and operates — the products this practice ships and runs itself, which is where the standard held to client delivery comes from.