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Offshore development center
A dedicated R&D center in Poland with recruitment, HR, payroll, office, and legal support included, and a buyout right from day one.
Fractional CTO for startups
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Since 2016
Supporting R&D teams
~200
Specialists on staff
3 months
Average PoC delivery
60,000+
Engineers in our database
65%
Customers from referral
52%
Customers 2+ years
Trusted by leading companies
About
What is a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO is a senior technology leader who owns your architecture, technology strategy, engineering standards, and technical hiring, working with you part-time instead of joining as a full-time executive.
The model is also known as CTO as a service, on demand CTO, interim CTO, part-time CTO, outsourced CTO, and virtual CTO services. When the roadmap needs hands rather than direction, we back it with custom software development capacity and offshore development center teams.
Who it's for
When you need a fractional CTO?
01
You’re a non-technical founder with a strong vision who needs the architecture, tech stack, and execution plan for a team
02
Companies raising capital who need their architecture, tech stack, and roadmap defended under intense investor review
03
Your team is shipping slowly or building fragile code. You need to diagnose the root cause: is it architecture, process, or people?
04
Startups between funding rounds or leadership changes that need flexible, on-demand CTO expertise without the full-time commitment
Comparison
Fractional CTO vs other leadership models
Fractional CTO | Full-time CTO | Technical co-founder | Tech consultant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Suits | Startups and scale-ups needing execution plus leadership | Mature or large organizations | Founders ready to trade equity for a permanent partner | Specific technical problems and audits |
Commitment | Flexible, by agreement | 40+ hrs/week | Full-time, open-ended | One-off or short-term |
Execution involvement | High | High | High | Low |
Focus | Strategy and execution balance | Long-term org leadership | Building the company with you | Problem-solving and advice |
Cost structure | Time actually spent | Salary, equity, benefits | Equity, often with little salary early | Fixed fee per engagement |
Continuity | Ongoing across quarters | Permanent | Permanent, and hard to reverse | Ends with the deliverable |
Fractional CTO
Full-time CTO
Technical co-founder
Tech consultant
Suits
Startups and scale-ups needing execution plus leadership
Mature or large organizations
Founders ready to trade equity for a permanent partner
Specific technical problems and audits
Commitment
Flexible, by agreement
40+ hrs/week
Full-time, open-ended
One-off or short-term
Execution involvement
High
High
High
Low
Focus
Strategy and execution balance
Long-term org leadership
Building the company with you
Problem-solving and advice
Cost structure
Time actually spent
Salary, equity, benefits
Equity, often with little salary early
Fixed fee per engagement
Continuity
Ongoing across quarters
Permanent
Permanent, and hard to reverse
Ends with the deliverable
Testimonials
Their professionalism, flexibility, and commitment to our success have made them a trusted strategic partner.
Dor Atias
Co-Founder & CPO
OTS has been a great business partner, allowing us to expand the team efficiently across varying areas of expertise: engineering, design, QA, creative production, and so on.
Adam Stevens
CEO & Co-Founder
What stood out most was OTS's ability to grasp our product vision and translate complex requirements into practical, effective technical solutions.
Dr. Hank D
Director & Co-founder
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I chose them over other options because they had high ratings […] they were a great culture fit, and their company values aligned with ours.
Yan Sidorenko
CEO & Co-Founder
Why On The Spot Development
What you get from our fractional CTO?
Senior leaders matched to your product
You get an executive tech leader who understands your specific niche, whether it’s cloud architecture, AI/ML systems, or DevSecOps. Our fractional CTOs bring deep experience from scaling products at Orca Security, Cycode, and HoneyBook.
Independent technical judgment
Architectural guidance focused strictly on your product, not on selling you more development hours. If the answer is "do not build this yet," you will hear it directly.
Hands-on, not advisory only
Our CTO takes part in architecture reviews, engineering planning, and the implementation decisions that carry risk. On one pharmaceutical AI platform, our CTO ran the technical kickoff: architecture, the build setup, and the first hires.
Specialist depth behind the leader
A solo fractional CTO is always capped by one person's experience. With us, your leader is backed by our entire organization’s collective intelligence.
65% of customers come through referral
We work as a long-term partner rather than a short-term advisor. Over half our active customers have been with us more than two years, and the average partnership runs past three.
Visibility into the work
Clear scope agreed before we start, with regular and transparent progress reports. You always know what your CTO is building and why.
What's included
What your Fractional CTO covers
Architecture and tech stack
You get a scalable architecture and tech stack chosen strictly for your growth plans, and tailored to the developers you can realistically hire in your market.
Engineering standards, AI-native
Your CTO sets high engineering standards and implements AI tools, metrics, and automated agent workflows to keep your developers operating at peak efficiency.
MVP scope and prioritization
Define your MVP and prioritize features that deliver business value first. This cuts development waste and heavily shortens your time-to-market.
Technical due diligence
Get a clear assessment of your product, code, and engineering setup. Your CTO identify hidden technical risks, and scalability constraints.
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Technology roadmap
System evolution, scalability planning, and the technical milestones that matter to your board, tied to business goals rather than to technology fashion.
Prototyping and PoC
Test complex ideas before investing heavily. Your CTO builds practical Proof of Concepts (PoC) to settle the core engineering approach before full-scale development begins.
Industries & Domains
CTO's technical domains
Cybersecurity
Cloud and runtime security, detection engineering, delivery-pipeline and supply-chain security. Increasingly, securing AI in the product and in the pipeline. Domain experience: Orca Security, Cycode.
AI and machine learning
Regulated document review where retrieval quality decides product quality long before model choice does, and every generated output needs an audit trail. AI-first consumer mobile apps. Domain experience: 44pixels.
Gaming and ad tech
Growth and monetisation at ad-network scale: analytics that stay honest at billions of events, personalisation where a latency regression is a revenue regression, and UX layers embedded into the mobile operating system and shipped through handset makers and carriers. Domain experience: Unity, Tripledot Studios.
Fintech
Trading platforms under multi-jurisdiction regulation, partner-facing CRM, onboarding and retention flows, and real-time monitoring of voice, chat and email for compliance teams.
Sports and media
Personalised live content at match-day traffic peaks: real-time scores and clips, per-user feeds, and notification delivery where late is the same as broken. Domain experience: 365Scores, Fisikal.
SaaS and marketplaces
Billing, contracts and customer communication in a single flow, in-app payments, and end-to-end synchronisation with an external system of record. Domain expertise: HoneyBook.
Success stories
Scaling a team for a sportstech platform
Expanding an engineering team for a global sports product
Under NDA
Dedicated team for a venture capital-funded startup
Building and supporting a 17+ team for a VC-backed startup in mobile AI
Under NDA
Development team for an AI‑driven cybersecurity startup
Building and scaling a 25‑person team in Poland for a VC-backed startup.
Under NDA
Offshore team for a clientflow management platform
Extending the R&D team behind a CRM and FinTech platform for small businesses
Under NDA
Dedicated team for a fintech & enterprise AI company
Building and growing an engineering team in Poland
Under NDA
Transparent Pricing
On-Demand CTO. Predictable pricing
Fractional CTO rate
Time commitment
Rate and scope agreed upfront, before the engagement starts
No full-time salary, equity dilution, bonuses, or recruitment fees, just a predictable hourly rate
Flexible involvement tailored to your project milestones
Our process
How the engagement works
Discovery and technical context
Our CTO starts with your product vision, business goals, technical constraints, and organizational context, in conversations with the people who own each of them.
01
Engagement setup
Together we agree scope, cadence, and level of involvement, against your stage and what is urgent right now.
02
System and engineering assessment
Written findings on architecture, stack, infrastructure, and engineering practice: what works, what is at risk, what it costs to fix, in what order.
03
Context-driven technical direction
A clear technical roadmap tied directly to business milestones: from tech stack decisions to model pipelines. If hiring stalls, the CTO structures the roles and requirements.
04
Strategy-to-execution alignment
The direction gets tested against reality: sprints run on the new process, the first structural changes land, and the first measurable change lands early rather than after a long setup.
05
Ongoing rhythm and scaling
06
The CTO stays on a recurring weekly commitment, and On The Spot Development scales the engagement around milestones such as a funding round, a launch, or a scaling push.
CTO advisory
CTO consulting and advisory at every stage
Ideation
Before anything gets engineered, the CTO sizes the build honestly, chooses an architecture and tech stack that will not need replacing in a year, and decides which assumptions a proof of concept has to settle first. Founders at this stage often need one more thing: someone who can read a development agency's proposal and say whether the estimate is realistic.
Development
The product is being built, and the work moves to engineering standards, code and architecture review, release and environment setup, and the first technical hires. Here, teams either choose to take on technical debt strategically, or they just create it by accident.
Growth
The constraint shifts from building to scaling: performance under load, cost per transaction, security and compliance as the product grows, and an engineering organisation that needs structure. At this stage the CTO also handles the technical side of fundraising, from due diligence preparation to the roadmap you present to a board.
Growth opportunities
Our engineering community
TechSpot
Tech events in Poland for everyone interested in software architecture and systems design. Like-minded people, top experts from leading companies, and a big engineering community.
137 Podcast
Related services
Explore our other services
FAQ
Frequently asked
questions
Fractional CTO vs full-time CTO: what is the difference?
The scope of responsibility is similar; the commitment and the cost are not. A full-time CTO works 40+ hours a week on salary, equity, and benefits and leads the organization long term. A fractional CTO works flexible hours by agreement, focuses on the decisions that carry the most risk, and costs only the time actually spent.
How much does CTO as a service cost?
Cost tracks the involvement you need rather than a fixed package, and three things drive it: hours per week, depth of involvement, and how long the engagement runs. Scope and rate are agreed before we start. The comparison that matters is a full-time CTO package: salary, equity, bonus, recruitment fees, and benefits, paid in full every month regardless of how many hard decisions it held.
Part-time, virtual, outsourced, interim: what is the difference?
On demand CTO, part-time CTO, virtual CTO services and outsourced CTO all describe the same flexible arrangement. Interim is the exception: it fills a full-time seat for a defined period, usually after a departure. A fractional CTO is long-term at partial capacity, not a stopgap. We do both.
Do you provide developers alongside the CTO?
Yes, and it is optional. Many engagements grow from architecture and roadmap into an engineering team working under the same technical direction, through custom software development for individual specialists or an offshore development center for a permanent team.
Can the engagement move in-house later?
The engagement can move from CTO as a service into a dedicated team or an offshore development center, and the buyout right applies to that team from day one. The fractional CTO role itself stays with us. We have run exactly this transition for a customer.
How quickly can a fractional CTO start?
After a discovery conversation and an agreed scope, engagements typically begin within days rather than weeks. The first weeks focus on the system and engineering assessment, which is what makes every later recommendation specific to your product instead of generic advice.
Who owns the code and the IP?
You do. All intellectual property created during the engagement belongs to your company. We are EU-based, so GDPR compliance and EU IP protection apply by default. If the engagement grows into a dedicated team, the buyout right lets you hire those engineers into your own company at any point.
What does a startup CTO consultant do at each stage?
At ideation: MVP scope, architecture and tech stack, and what a proof of concept has to answer. During development: engineering standards, code and architecture review, environments, and the first technical hires. At growth: performance under load, security and compliance, org structure, and technical due diligence. CTO advisory covers all three, and the emphasis moves as the product does.
Book your CTO strategy session
Tell us where the product is and what is blocking it. We will tell you what a fractional CTO would do first.
Thank you!
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