// Consulting — Fractional CTO
Fractional CTO for robotics.
Senior engineering leadership for robotics — architecture, hiring, scaling, and the technical side of fundraising, growth, and enterprise readiness. Available at a time commitment that fits what you actually need.
Who this
is for
Two kinds of teams tend to hire us for this. The first is robotics founders whose hardware or research team is strong but where software, AI, or production-systems is the gap — and where bringing on a full-time engineering leader isn’t the right move yet. The second is established companies adopting robotics as a major strategic initiative — manufacturers building autonomy, healthcare or logistics companies launching robotic product lines, hardware OEMs that need a software-defined product layer — where the existing engineering leadership is strong on the hardware, mechanical, or operational side and the software and infrastructure side is the part nobody on the leadership team is set up to lead yet. The work is the same in both cases: senior engineering judgment in the room, without the cost or timeline of a full-time hire.
What we
usually see
Most teams hire us at an inflection point. They’ve got proof — demos that work, customers, traction — and are hitting the moment where what got them this far won’t quite get them to the next stage. The engineering side now needs to carry business strategy with it: shipping cadence tuned to a real customer-discovery loop, architectural decisions made with the next two years of product in mind, hiring that compounds rather than churns, security and compliance posture that opens enterprise doors rather than closes them. The work is about marrying business strategy with engineering rigor, in a way most teams haven’t had a leader for yet.
Where we
can help
Engineering architecture review and a roadmap the team can actually execute on.
Rapid implementation of core technologies — getting the foundational pieces of the stack (architecture, infrastructure, key components) built or unblocked, not just designed in a doc.
MVP development — getting the first real version of the product shipped, beyond just a demo that gets shown around.
Setting up engineering processes that scale — planning cadence, code review, release management, on-call rotation, sprint rituals. The boring infrastructure that lets a team ship predictably without leadership having to be in every decision.
Senior technical hires — Head of Perception, MLOps Lead, Staff Engineers, security hires — with someone in the room who can evaluate candidates credibly.
Development of the team — working alongside engineers on the hard problems and structuring how seniority and ownership grow as the company scales.
Technical credibility for a fundraise: deck review, narrative sharpening, technical DD prep, partner conversations.
Security and compliance posture for enterprise customer reviews — SOC 2, security questionnaires, secure SDL quickstart.
Board reporting and engineering KPIs the board can actually use.
Vendor and tooling decisions — cloud, ML platform, observability stack.
And more — what’s listed here is a sample, not a menu. Most engagements pull in whatever’s most painful that month.
Why teams
work with us
What teams hire us for isn’t general engineering advice — plenty of fractional CTOs can give that. It’s senior judgment across the whole picture a robotics company has to navigate at once: software architecture, hardware integration, supply chain, AI ethics, regulatory exposure, and the business decisions sitting on top of all of it. The technical and the commercial are tangled together at this stage, and the person sitting between them has to be conversant on both sides. That’s the work we do. We take on a small number of engagements at a time so we can stay long enough for the decisions to actually matter.
Adjacent
work
Engagements rarely live alone. A couple of the areas this one most often pulls in.
Production Engineering
Architectural decisions made under a fractional CTO almost always pull through into the CI/CD, OTA, and release work that production engineering covers.
Data Platform & Observability
Board reporting, customer trust assets, and ML strategy all depend on the data infrastructure being something the team can actually query.
Get in
touch
Reach the team directly. Tell us what you’re trying to ship and we’ll tell you what an engagement on this would look like.
Looking for the broader practice? Back to the consulting overview.