fractional cto

Technical leadership for early-stage startups

Ship faster — with AI doing real work in your product, your codebase, and your operations.

I've been the technical co-founder who stayed up until 3am fixing production. The operator who scaled a team from 2 to 20. The consultant who walked into chaos and left behind systems that actually work. Currently: running three production Rails apps and a **multi-agent AI system** with 6 specialized agents across Anthropic, Codex, and Kimi. Agents handle coding, PR review, deployment, PM/triage, and operations — all orchestrated through a custom work queue system I built. Previously: CTO and co-founder at LEA. Before that: engineering leadership at a half-dozen NYC startups. I work with a small number of companies at a time — enough to go deep, not enough to need account managers.
What makes me different: Most fractional CTOs can talk about AI. I build AI systems — production multi-agent architectures, autonomous deployment pipelines, memory systems with vector search (pgvector), and agent orchestration that actually ships code. If you want someone who's done the work, not just read the blog posts, that's me.

Results, Not Promises

At LEA, I built the document intelligence platform that enterprise wealth management firms rely on:

50%reduction in clients' manual data entry
$10B+AUM firms served
3×document volume growth in 9 months
3person team that shipped it all

Source: Reducto case study on LEA — thousands of financial documents processed monthly, 65% quarter-over-quarter growth.

Who This Is For

  • Seed/Series A startups without technical leadership
  • Non-technical founders who need a technical brain they can trust
  • Teams that are stuck — slow releases, constant fires, technical debt crushing morale
  • Companies about to scale and realizing their architecture won’t survive it
  • Founders who want to leverage AI but don’t know where to start (or got burned by hype)

Who This Is Not For

  • You want a slide deck to show the board
  • You’re looking for a dev shop to throw tickets at
  • You want “AI” on the pitch deck more than in the product
  • You need a full-time CTO yesterday — though I’ll help you hire one

What You Get

AI Systems & Agent Architecture

  • Multi-agent system design — when to use one agent vs. many, how they coordinate
  • Model selection across providers (Anthropic, Codex, Kimi, etc.) — what each does well
  • Memory systems: structured (files) vs. semantic (embeddings/vector search)
  • Prompt engineering that actually works — evaluation frameworks, iteration cycles
  • Autonomous coding agents: Claude Code, Codex CLI, setup and guardrails
  • Where AI saves real time vs. where it's theater — I'll tell you the truth

Technical Strategy & Architecture

  • Stack decisions that won't haunt you in 18 months
  • Architecture reviews — what's working, what's about to break
  • Build vs. buy guidance (spoiler: you probably don't need to build it)
  • Technical due diligence prep for your next round

Team Building & Process

  • Hiring — what to look for, how to evaluate, when to compromise
  • Engineering culture that ships instead of bikesheds
  • Process that helps instead of hinders
  • Mentoring your senior engineers into leaders

Hands-On Execution

  • Code review and standards that stick
  • Refactoring plans that don't require a 6-month freeze
  • Incident response and reliability engineering
  • Database performance and scaling strategy

How It Works

Advisory retainer — Monthly engagement with scheduled calls and async Slack access. Best for ongoing guidance. The context compounds: every month I know your team, your stack, and your history better — and the advice gets sharper.

Project-based — Deep dive into a specific problem: AI integration, architecture overhaul, team restructure, technical due diligence. Fixed scope, fixed timeline.

Fractional CTO — Embedded leadership 2-3 days/week. Running standups, reviewing code, making the calls. For teams that need leadership now but aren’t ready for a full-time hire. Denser than it sounds: no ramp-up, no hand-holding, no meetings about meetings.

How I Work

  • No decks and roadmaps that sit in a drawer. I fix the thing that's actually broken.
  • Plain English over consultantese.
  • Async by default. Calls when they're useful.
  • Small changes that ship this week beat big plans that ship next quarter.
  • If I'm not adding obvious value, fire me. No lock-ins, no hard feelings.

Let's Talk

Tell me what you're building and where you're stuck.

Book a 30-minute intro call

30 minutes. No pitch — just figuring out if there's a fit.

or email chuck.blake@gmail.com

Brooklyn, NY · Available for remote or on-site in NYC