Architecture & Tech-Stack Review
Independent review of your current or planned architecture and technology choices, with clear, practical recommendations.
Fractional CTO Services
Fractional CTO Services
Senior technical leadership for startups and scale-ups that need architecture judgment, technical hiring support, and vendor oversight, without a full-time CTO hire.
What is a fractional CTO, and what do they actually do?
Deep Dev Solutions provides fractional CTO services for funded startups and scale-ups in the UK, US, and GCC that need senior technical leadership without hiring a full-time CTO. Engagements cover architecture and tech-stack review, technical hiring support, oversight of existing development vendors or agencies, and roadmap sanity-checking.
Problems we solve
Why this keeps going wrong
Many growing companies reach a point where technical decisions — architecture, vendor selection, hiring the first engineers — need senior judgment the founding team doesn't have in-house, but don't yet justify a full-time CTO hire. Getting this wrong is expensive: a bad architecture decision or a mis-hired engineering lead can cost months and real money to unwind.
Capabilities
What we build
Technical Hiring Support
Writing technical hiring briefs, screening candidates, and evaluating technical interviews for your first engineering hires.
Vendor & Agency Oversight
Independent oversight of existing development vendors or agencies — reviewing code quality, timelines, and whether you're getting what you're paying for.
Roadmap & Investor Readiness
Sanity-checking your technical roadmap and helping translate technical decisions into terms a board or investor can evaluate.
Is this right for you?
A good fit if
- You are funded or growing without a technical co-founder, and the technical decisions are piling up.
- You have developers but nobody senior enough to tell you whether their decisions are sound.
- You are evaluating vendors, agencies, or a build-versus-buy call and need someone whose incentive is not to win the work.
- You have technical due diligence coming and want to know what a reviewer will find before they find it.
Probably not, if
- You need a full-time CTO in the building every day. Say so, and we will tell you honestly.
- You want someone to write the code. That is a delivery engagement — see the other pillars.
“Is this advice, or will someone actually do the work?”
Advisory and delivery are kept deliberately separate, and it matters. The fractional CTO engagement is architecture decisions, roadmap sanity-checking, technical hiring input, vendor and stack evaluation, and code quality oversight. Hands-on build is a separate, separately-priced engagement. The reason is a conflict of interest you should watch for everywhere: an advisor who is also the delivery vendor has an incentive to recommend building, and to recommend building it themselves. Keeping the two apart means the advice you get about whether to hire, outsource, or buy off the shelf is advice you can actually trust — including when the honest answer is that you do not need us.
Process
How we work
01
Discovery Call
We understand your current technical situation, team, and the specific decisions you need support on.
02
Scope & Cadence
We agree the engagement scope and cadence — a fixed number of hours or days per month, matched to what you actually need.
03
Ongoing Advisory
Regular working sessions covering architecture decisions, hiring, vendor oversight, and roadmap review.
04
Scale Up or Hand Off
As your needs grow, we help you scale the engagement, bring on delivery support, or hand off cleanly to a full-time hire.
Engagement
How we scope the work
Most agencies make you book a call just to find out how they engage. Here are the three shapes this work usually takes, so you can tell where you fit before you contact us. Final scope and cost depend on your specific requirements — we quote after the free audit, not before.
Tier 1 — Architecture review
One decision, reviewed properly.
- A single stack, vendor, or scaling decision assessed in depth
- Delivered as a written recommendation you can act on
- No ongoing commitment
- Best when you need one answer, not a relationship
Most common
Tier 2 — Fixed-day advisory
Senior technical judgement, on a regular cadence.
- An agreed number of days per week or month
- Architecture ownership, roadmap sanity-checking, code quality oversight
- Technical hiring input and vendor evaluation
- The common shape in this market, and usually the right starting point
Tier 3 — Embedded leadership
Deeper involvement through a critical period.
- Technical due diligence preparation ahead of a raise or acquisition
- Leading an existing engineering team through a transition
- Hands-on delivery available, quoted separately to keep the advice honest
- For a defined period with a defined end, not indefinitely
Technical stack
Technologies we commonly use for this service, selected based on the specific project requirements.
Next.jsNestJSTypeScriptPythonPostgreSQL
Common questions
Questions business owners usually ask before starting a project.
In practice, nothing. The two terms describe the same buyer need and are used interchangeably across the market, along with part-time CTO and CTO-as-a-Service. Fractional has become the more common label, which is why this page leads with it, but if you have been searching for outsourced CTO services you are in the right place. Do not read a difference in scope into the difference in wording — there generally is not one.
Hire the engineer when the bottleneck is capacity — you know what to build and need more hands to build it. Bring in a fractional CTO when the bottleneck is judgement: you are not sure the technical direction is right, you cannot evaluate whether your developers' decisions are sound, or you are about to make a costly and hard-to-reverse decision about architecture, vendors, or hiring. The two are not substitutes. A senior engineer will not usually tell you not to build something, and that is often the most valuable advice available.
A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works with your company part-time or on a defined engagement, providing architecture judgment, technical hiring support, and vendor oversight — without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
A fractional CTO engagement is ongoing and covers the breadth of what a CTO would own — architecture, hiring, vendor oversight, roadmap — rather than a single project or audit.
The core fractional CTO scope is advisory — architecture, hiring, and oversight. If you also need hands-on delivery, that's available as a separate, explicitly scoped add-on, not bundled by default.
It depends on your stage and needs — we agree a specific cadence (days or hours per month) during the discovery call rather than a one-size-fits-all package.
Funded startups and scale-ups without a technical co-founder, or teams whose in-house technical lead needs senior architecture backup.
Ready to fix this for your business?
Start with a free audit. We will review the problem and tell you exactly what it will take to solve it.
Talk to a Fractional CTO