Fractional CTO services: senior technical leadership, at the level your company needs now
A fractional CTO is an experienced technology executive who leads your engineering part-time, usually one to three days a week, for as long as you need one. Speer provides fractional CTOs to founders, executives and boards across Canada and the United States, backed by a team of engineers, designers and IP specialists who can execute what the CTO decides.
What you get with Speer
- Architecture and technical strategy: platform, stack, build-versus-buy and AI decisions your product can grow into
- The engineering team: auditing what you have, hiring or replacing, and setting delivery standards
- Vendors and partners: reviewing agency and offshore output and deciding what comes in-house
- Investors, customers and auditors: due diligence, board materials, security questionnaires and compliance programs
When a company needs one
- A non-technical founder is making five-year technology decisions alone, or taking them from whichever vendor is in the room.
- An offshore or agency team is shipping slowly and nobody inside the company can tell whether the code is sound.
- A raise, an enterprise deal or a compliance audit (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA) needs someone who has been through it.
- The company needs a CTO’s judgement but cannot yet justify, or find, a full-time one.
How it has worked for partners
Grata. Speer’s founder has served as advisor and acting CTO at Grata, a Toronto smart living platform, since 2022. The engagement moved Grata from an unstable offshore build to a local team, rebuilt the Bluetooth digital key layer and reached SOC 2 and PCI compliance, after which Grata secured US$5M in deals and raised US$3.5M.
Baker Health. Speer took over engineering for a New York and New Jersey primary care practice whose apps were failing, replaced the team and process, and rebuilt both apps with EMR integration in nine months.
How an engagement runs
- Discovery call: one conversation about where the company is and what decisions are pending.
- Technical audit: two to three weeks reviewing code, infrastructure, team and vendors, ending in a written assessment and a 90-day plan.
- Ongoing leadership: a fixed number of days per week, with a named Speer CTO, and access to Speer’s engineering team when the plan calls for building.
- Transition: when the company is ready for a full-time CTO, we help hire and hand over.
Why Speer rather than an individual
An independent fractional CTO brings one person’s experience. Speer brings a CTO plus the team behind them: 40+ specialists in engineering, design, legal and IP strategy, patents filed and granted for partners’ products, and a track record across healthcare, real estate, finance, transportation and entertainment. When the plan says “rebuild the mobile app”, the same company can do it.
FAQs
Common questions, answered briefly. Book a call for anything specific to your situation.
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A fractional CTO leads a company’s technology part-time: setting architecture and roadmap, building and managing the engineering team, overseeing vendors, and representing technology to investors, customers and auditors. The company gets CTO-level decisions without a full-time executive salary.