Services

Three shapes of engagement. They overlap, and most relationships start with the smallest one.

Fractional CTO

2 days/week, 3-month minimum

A named owner for the technical decisions that span teams, embedded with yours two days a week.

I take responsibility for a short and explicit list: the shape of the architecture, the hiring bar, the on-call story, and the handful of bets that would be expensive to reverse. Delivery stays with the people already doing it.

In practice that means I am in your planning and architecture conversations, I write the decision records, and I am the person your board can ask a technical question.

The engagement is working when your team makes the same decisions I would, without me in the room. That is also when it should end.

Architecture review

3 weeks, fixed price

Three weeks of measurement and interviews, ending in a written recommendation you can act on or ignore.

A review starts with measurement, not opinion. I instrument the paths you are worried about, read the incident history, and interview the engineers who have been there longest.

The deliverable is a written document: what is actually slow or fragile, what it would cost to fix, and what I would do in your position. It names the options you should not take and says why.

Most reviews recommend less work than the team expected. One in three cancels a planned rewrite.

Team and hiring

6 weeks, then ad hoc

Writing down the hiring bar, building the loop that tests for it, and training your engineers to run it.

Senior hiring fails quietly. The loop feels rigorous, everyone is polite, and the bar drifts a little with each hire until nobody can describe it.

I work with you to write the bar down, build one structured loop around a real stuck decision from your codebase, and then sit in as an interviewer until your own engineers are calibrated and running it without me.

This also covers the unglamorous parts: levelling, the first on-call rotation, and what to do about the engineer everyone is avoiding a conversation with.

Not sure which one

Describe the decision you are stuck on and I will tell you which of these fits, or tailor one specifically for your needs.

hello@sriannamalai.com