FRACTIONAL CTO · SAN DIEGO COUNTY
A fractional CTO in San Diego
for the stretch where you can’t hire one.
Most teams don’t need a full-time CTO. They need someone who has already made the decision in front of them — and will say plainly which way to go and what it costs.
Based in Oceanside. I work in person with founders and engineering teams across San Diego County, and remotely everywhere else.
Where I’m useful
Agentic engineering strategy
You’re being told to adopt AI tooling and nobody can say what good looks like. I’ll define where agents earn their keep, where they don’t, and what has to be true before you scale it.
Architecture & scaling
Proof of concept works, the second engineer just joined, and the seams are showing. Roadmap, architecture, and the sequencing to get there without a rewrite.
Team & leadership design
Hiring plan, ownership boundaries, review culture. The organizational half of why systems fail, which is usually the larger half.
A good fit if
—
You have a product in market or close to it
—
You want an opinion, not a deliverable
—
Your team is small enough that decisions still travel fast
—
You’re figuring out how AI fits into how you build
Probably not if
—
You need hands on keyboard full time
—
The decision is already made and needs validating
—
You’re looking for a staffing agency
—
Budget is contingent on a fixed-bid scope
Brett Lee
Building software since 2001 — Apple, PlayStation, Pearson, and the startups in between. I’ve led platform and creative-tools teams through the parts nobody puts in the case study: the rewrite that shouldn’t have happened, the org chart that was actually the architecture problem, the tool that got adopted because it was three seconds faster.
Questions people ask
What does a fractional CTO cost in San Diego?
Most engagements run $3,000–$8,000 a month depending on hours and scope. A fixed-price readiness assessment starts at $2,500. For smaller, well-defined jobs we can agree an hourly rate instead. That compares with the salary and equity of a full-time CTO hire.
How many hours a week is a typical engagement?
Four to twelve hours a week is typical. The first month is usually heavier while I learn your systems and team; after that, engagements settle into a steady cadence with a weekly leadership check-in.
When should a startup hire a fractional CTO instead of a full-time one?
When you have a product in market or close to it, a team small enough that decisions still travel fast, and technical decisions coming up that you can't yet evaluate. A full-time CTO makes sense once you have ten or more engineers or a technology roadmap that needs a full-time owner.
What happens in the first 30 days?
A short call about the actual problem, then a readiness assessment: I review your repositories, architecture, release process, and team structure and talk with your engineers. You get a written assessment with the top risks and a recommended order of work, whether or not we continue.
Building something that needs to hold up?
Start with a conversation. No deck, no discovery phase — just the actual problem.