Architecting
Scalable Growth
Expert leadership for startups that can't afford a full-time CTO salary. I turn technical bottlenecks into your biggest competitive advantage.
Stop Technical Debt Before It Stops Your Growth
Sound familiar? These are the challenges that signal you need senior technical leadership.
Development Slowdown
Features that used to take days now take weeks. Technical debt is compounding faster than you can address it.
AI Uncertainty
Everyone is talking about AI, but you're not sure what's hype vs. what will actually move your metrics.
Architecture Chaos
Your system grew organically and now every change feels risky. No one fully understands the whole picture.
Investor Scrutiny
Your next funding round is coming and you need your technology to be viewed as an asset, not a liability.
Strategic Technical Leadership Tailored to Your Stage
Whether you're a startup in Manchester's Enterprise City or a remote team across the UK, these packages provide the high-level oversight needed to succeed.
Ihor helped us navigate a complex pivot when our tech debt was killing velocity. Within 3 months, our deployment frequency went from bi-weekly to daily.
What's Included
Every project is different, but here's what you can typically expect.
Technical Due Diligence & Audits
Prepare your tech stack for investor scrutiny. Code audits, security reviews, and infrastructure cost analysis for Series A/B rounds.
Architecture Scalability
Design systems ready for 10x growth. Monolith vs microservices decisions, database scaling, and infrastructure modernization.
AI Strategy & Roadmap
Navigate the AI landscape strategically. LLM Ops, RAG architecture, and ROI-focused AI integration planning.
Team Mentoring & Recruitment
Build and level up your engineering team. Technical interviews, job descriptions, and developer career guidance.
Vendor & Agency Management
Cut through sales pitches and evaluate external partners objectively. Contract negotiation and accountability frameworks.
Investor & Board Communication
Translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders. Due diligence support and board-level reporting.
How I Think Through Problems
Click on options to see my analysis
Black Friday Traffic Spike
Your e-commerce site needs to handle 10x normal traffic during Black Friday sale. Current infrastructure maxes out at 2x.
This is what you get: not just advice, but reasoning you can trust.
Common Use Cases
This service is a good fit if you need:
How We Work Together
Discovery Call
Free 30-minute session to understand your business, challenges, and goals. No commitment required.
Assessment
Deep dive into your technology, team, and processes. Identify quick wins and strategic priorities.
Engagement
Flexible involvement — from one-time audits to ongoing fractional leadership. Scale up or down as needed.
Transition
When you hire a full-time CTO, I ensure clean handover with documented processes and knowledge transfer.
Explore Before You Contact
Not sure where to start? These free tools can help you clarify your needs and come prepared for our conversation.
Related Services
Often combined with fractional cto
Ready to Get Started?
Let's discuss your project and see how I can help.
Manchester's tech scene is booming, and I'm here to support Northern Powerhouse startups with global-standard technical leadership. Whether you're based in Enterprise City, MediaCityUK, or anywhere across the UK, fractional CTO services provide the strategic oversight you need without the £150k+ full-time commitment.
Why Manchester Startups Choose Fractional Leadership
The Manchester tech ecosystem has unique advantages — lower costs than London, strong talent from local universities, and a collaborative startup community. But growing here still requires world-class technical leadership:
- Pre-seed to Series A guidance — Navigate technical decisions when every pound counts
- Agency oversight — Evaluate external development partners objectively
- AI readiness assessment — Separate hype from genuine business value
- Investor-ready documentation — Prepare your stack for due diligence
Technical Leadership That Understands AI
With 18+ years of experience in system architecture and deep expertise in LLM Ops and RAG architectures, I'm not just a manager who delegates to developers. I understand the technical implications of AI integration — from vector databases like Pinecone and pgvector to production deployment with LangChain and LlamaIndex.
This dual expertise means I can guide your team on both traditional scalability challenges and cutting-edge AI implementation, ensuring you don't fall for vendor lock-in or over-engineered solutions.
Infrastructure & DevOps Excellence
Modern technical leadership requires hands-on understanding of:
- Infrastructure as Code — Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
- Container orchestration — Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, ECS
- CI/CD pipelines — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins
- Security audits — OWASP compliance, penetration testing coordination
- Cloud cost optimization — AWS, Azure, GCP spend analysis
The Economics of Fractional CTO Services
A full-time CTO in the UK commands a salary of £150,000 to £300,000 or more, plus equity, benefits, and recruiting costs. Fractional engagement provides similar expertise at 20-40% of the cost, with flexibility to scale involvement based on your current runway.
More importantly, you gain access to patterns and antipatterns from multiple companies — lessons a single-company executive might never encounter. This objective perspective, unclouded by internal politics, often proves more valuable than full-time availability.
Getting Started
Whether you're a startup in Manchester's Northern Quarter or a remote team across the UK, I offer a free 30-minute discovery call to understand your challenges. No sales pitch — just an honest conversation about whether fractional CTO services make sense for your stage.
Technical leadership shouldn't be a luxury reserved for well-funded enterprises. If you're building something ambitious and want experienced perspective guiding your technical decisions, let's talk.