Fractional CTO & VP of Engineering — the seat, not the salary.

When this makes sense

Four ways companies arrive at this conversation.

Rarely because someone read about fractional leadership and liked the idea. Usually because something has just broken, or is about to.

• The engineering head just left — mid-roadmap, with a board meeting coming and a senior search that will take months you don't have.
• The team outgrew its leadership — the strongest engineer was promoted into a management seat and is now doing two jobs badly, through no fault of their own.
• You've never had a CTO — the product got built, the company found customers, and nobody senior has ever owned the architecture, the hiring bar, or the roadmap.
• You're about to raise or be diligenced — and the technical story needs to hold up to someone who reads code for a living.

Which seat

CTO or VP of Engineering — which do you actually need?

They are different jobs, and hiring for the wrong one is expensive. A CTO owns technology strategy: what to build, what to buy, what the architecture must be able to do in two years, and how the technical story is told to a board. A VP of Engineering owns delivery: the team, the hiring bar, the release cadence, and whether things ship when they were said to ship.

Most companies between seed and Series B feel the second gap first and misdiagnose it as the first. Prayantr covers either seat, and part of a first engagement is telling you plainly which one you were missing — including when the honest answer is that you need a full-time hire rather than a fractional one.

As your CTO, or beside one

Not every engagement replaces a leader. Where there is already a founder-CTO carrying four jobs, the work is to take two of them — delivery cadence and the hiring loop — for a couple of quarters, under their direction, and hand back cleanly. That is a different engagement from stepping into an empty seat, and it is scoped differently.

What's included

Executive engineering leadership, one to three days a week.

• Technology strategy & roadmap — owned, written down, defended.
• Architecture direction — reviews, decisions, and the paper trail behind them.
• Engineering hiring — sourcing, interview loops, scorecards, and closing senior candidates. Including the search for the permanent hire, if that is where this is heading.
• Org design & delivery process — releases, on-call, sprint cadence, and the rhythm that makes dates mean something.
• Vendor & partner negotiation — contracts, SLAs, and integration terms.
• Board & investor support — reporting, diligence preparation, and honest numbers in front of people who will remember them.

The first 30 days

What actually happens in month one.

Published here because it is the fairest thing to judge an engagement by — and because a fractional leader who cannot say what week three looks like should not be trusted with week one.

1. Weeks 1–2 — Listen

   The code, the people, the roadmap, and the board's expectations. Mostly questions, deliberately few opinions. The engineers usually know what is wrong; the job in the first fortnight is to earn the version they tell a stranger.

2. Week 3 — The state of things, in writing

   Current state, risks ranked by what they actually threaten, and the order of operations — one document, plain enough to forward. Whether or not the engagement continues, you keep it.

3. Week 4 onward — The cadence runs

   Delivery rhythm, architecture decisions, hiring if it's needed, and a monthly written summary the CEO can forward to the board unedited. No translation layer, no surprises in board week.

The shape of it

How this engagement usually goes.

Client work is confidential by default, so what follows is pattern, not portfolio — the engagement as the firm runs it. Named references are shared in conversation.

Why this firm

The person you meet does the work.

Marketplaces match you to a stranger; agencies sell a team and staff it later. Prayantr is principal-led: the founder takes the call, and the founder is in your architecture reviews and your hiring loop. Larger builds bring in engineers he has worked with directly, under his review — never a bench, never a handoff to someone you didn't meet. That is also why the firm runs few engagements at a time, and why the calendar is the real constraint on taking new ones.

The engagement is designed to end well: a 30-day exit clause on both sides, so nobody is trapped; the search for your permanent hire run as part of the work if you want it; and a documented handover so the person who lands inherits an organisation rather than a mystery. Two decades of platform and integration engineering sit behind the judgment — more on the entity and the person on The Firm, and the full career record at amitsolanki.com.

MSA + SOW on every engagement · 30-day exit, both ways · No hourly billing
IP assigned to you on payment · NDA on request · USD invoicing, worldwide