Executive Tech Leadership • 10–15 Hours/Week • Zero Full-Time Executive Overhead
Veteran CTO Leadership to Scale Your Systems, Govern Delivery, and Protect Your Runway.
High-touch architectural governance, engineering leadership, and strategic oversight for funded startups (Seed to Series B) and non-technical founders. Get the seasoned judgment of a 25-year enterprise tech executive at a fraction of full-time C-suite payroll.
Duration:
Engagement Model:
Investment:
Availability:
10–15 hours / week (Asynchronous governance + live weekly syncs)
3-Month Minimum Advisory Retainer
₹1,50,000 – ₹2,50,000 / month + GST (Global: $3,000 – $4,500 USD / month)
Strictly capped at 2 concurrent active retainers.
The High Cost of the "CTO Dilemma"
As your platform scales past early traction, the technical decisions you make directly dictate your burn rate, release speed, and enterprise valuation. Most growing companies face one of three traps:
- The Premature ₹80L+ C-Suite Hire: Hiring a full-time, veteran enterprise CTO costs ₹60L–₹1 Cr+ in salary plus significant equity—often before the company has the organizational scale to justify a full-time executive salary.
- The “Promoted Senior Engineer” Ceiling: You promoted your top developer to lead architect or VP of Engineering. While brilliant at coding, they lack experience with enterprise governance, board-level technical strategy, vendor negotiation, and large-scale architectural trade-offs.
- The Non-Technical Founder Vulnerability: If you are a business founder managing an outsourced agency or internal dev team, you have no neutral, experienced technical advocate to verify whether their architectural recommendations and timelines are accurate or over-scoped.
Strategic Governance, Not Unfocused Code Patching
A Fractional CTO does not sit in your daily standups writing utility functions. You are bringing in an executive partner to install discipline, protect architectural integrity, and align engineering output with business P&L.
Architecture & System Evolution
- Modularization & Scaling Strategy: Establish clean domain boundaries, database query standards, and decoupling paths so the system scales smoothly under 10x traffic.
- Technology Stack & Tool Selection: Objective build vs. buy evaluations. Eliminate unnecessary, costly third-party SaaS subscriptions and unproven frameworks.
- Performance & Reliability Guardrails: Review database indexing, caching strategies, and API latency to prevent critical outages before major customer rollouts.
Engineering Delivery & Velocity Governance
- Sprint Architecture Sign-Offs: Weekly review of technical design documents (TDDs) and critical pull requests to prevent tech debt from entering production.
- SDLC & Release Cadence Modernization: Enforce automated CI/CD pipelines, branch protection, testing gates, and rollback protocols to drop release cycle times from weeks to days.
- Developer Tooling & AI Orchestration: Introduce modern AI development workflows (Cursor, automated review pipelines, linter guardrails) to accelerate team output by 20–30%.
Executive, Board & Investor Advocacy
- Investor & Due Diligence Representation: Represent the company’s technology stack, disaster recovery plans, and IP ownership during venture capital funding rounds or enterprise customer audits.
- Engineering Hiring & Lead Mentorship: Vet senior engineering candidates, design technical interview rubrics, and mentor your internal tech leads into confident engineering managers.
- Enterprise Presales Support: Join high-stakes enterprise sales calls to handle architecture, compliance, and security questions from enterprise buyers’ IT security teams.
How We Work Together Every Month
A structured, predictable weekly cadence ensures continuous progress without clogging your calendar.
Weekly (60 Mins)
Executive Architecture & Roadmap Review
Review active sprint architecture, evaluate technical debt risks, and unblock key technical decisions with the CEO/VP of Engineering.
Weekly (45 Mins)
Engineering Lead Mentorship Session
1-on-1 coaching with your lead developer or engineering manager on delegation, architecture decisions, and code quality governance.
Asynchronous
Critical Architecture & Design Sign-offs
Direct review of critical PRs, database schema migrations, and infrastructure topology changes via GitHub/GitLab and Slack/Teams.
Monthly
Executive Delivery & Health Scorecard
Formal 1-page health report to founders/board covering velocity metrics, tech debt status, infrastructure costs, and next month’s priorities.
25+ Years at the Intersection of Technology & Business Strategy
You are not hiring a junior consultant reciting management frameworks. You are partnering with a seasoned practitioner who has spent over two decades building, operating, and turning around mission-critical software systems.
- Ex-CTO & Enterprise Systems Architect: Proven track record leading enterprise architecture, cloud microservices migrations, and zero-downtime refactors across high-throughput distributed systems.
- Bilingual in Tech & Finance: Able to translate database connection pools and API throttling to your board in terms of burn rate, customer retention, and Net Dollar Retention (NDR).
- Delivery-Backed by Aaruni: If your internal team lacks the bandwidth to execute critical architectural refactors or automation pipelines, you have immediate access to dedicated delivery pods through Aaruni Technology Solutions under my direct oversight.
Strategic Advisory
Ideal for teams needing high-level architecture validation and tech lead mentorship.
$
₹85,000 / month + GST | $1,500 USD / month
Scope
• Bi-weekly strategy & architecture reviews
• Asynchronous Slack/email guidance
• Monthly roadmap review
Turnaround - 5–8 hours / month
Billing Terms -3-Month Minimum Commitment
Executive Fractional CTO
Comprehensive technical leadership, sprint governance, and enterprise advocacy.
$
₹1,75,000 – ₹2,50,000 / month + GST | $3,000 – $4,500 USD / month
Scope
• Weekly architecture & sprint sign-offs
• 1-on-1 engineering lead mentorship
• Enterprise presales & investor
representation
• Infrastructure cost & cloud governance
Turnaround - 10–15 hours / week
Billing Terms - 3-Month Minimum Commitment
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the difference between a Fractional CTO and a full-time hire?
A full-time CTO hire is an expensive, permanent commitment (salary, benefits, significant equity) best suited when an organization reaches 50+ engineers. A Fractional CTO provides the same strategic vision, architectural rigor, and executive governance during the critical growth phase (5–25 engineers) at a fraction of the cost, with no long-term equity dilution.
Will you write production code for our product?
No. Writing day-to-day feature code is an inefficient use of executive advisory time. A Fractional CTO focuses on architecture design, reviewing critical pull requests, setting up deployment pipelines, unblocking technical deadlocks, and mentoring your team. For dedicated execution muscle, Aaruni Technology Solutions can deploy project-based engineering sprints.
How quickly can we begin?
Engagements start with a 20-minute strategic fit call. If there is mutual alignment, we typically kick off with the 10-Day Architecture Diagnostic to establish an objective baseline before beginning recurring monthly advisory.
Add a Veteran CTO to Your Executive Team This Month.
Book a confidential 20-minute fit assessment to evaluate your current engineering challenges and confirm whether Fractional CTO advisory matches your growth stage.
Direct discussion with Ravi Sunkadakatte. No sales reps, strictly peer-to-peer qualification.
