Fractional CTO for FinTech & AI-native teams
I help founders ship hard AI and FinTech systems on a deadline, then build the teams that keep shipping after I leave. 15+ years, four continents, payment platforms at 100M+ transactions a day, plus production AI systems written by my own hands.
Toronto, open now, replies within a business day
Founders bring me in when:
Selected work
Fractional CTO | FinTech | 2024
Hired five engineers from scratch and shipped a Next.js / TypeScript wallet plus a 31-component design system in 3.5 months.
5 hires | 100% on-time | 100% retention | 3.5 months 0 to 1
Head of Connectivity | Payments | 2021-2022
Restructured payments into pillar teams owning ACH, SEPA, FPS, cards and Swiss Open Banking. Led the gRPC migration; ran the Brazilian PIX market-entry research.
12 engineers | 100M+ tx/day | +40% velocity | 40% fewer payment failures
Fractional CTO | Modernization | 2022-2023
Recruited the entire engineering team from scratch and migrated a PHP / Laravel monolith to TypeScript microservices on AWS while production stayed up. Core IP unbundled into a productized engine.
8 hires | 50 to 70% lower cloud spend | 90% faster responses | 1.5s resume builds
Solo build | AI | 2022-2025
Sole engineer on three microservices: an evolutionary solver, a multi-model validator (GPT-5, o3, Gemini in parallel) and a multi-agent forecasting framework.
+192.8% strategy lift | 73% success rate | 30-problem benchmark | 0 to 50 worker auto-scale
Team Lead | Enterprise AI | 2024-2026
Led an enterprise knowledge-management initiative for one of the world's largest advertising holdings, combining a graph database with agentic AI workflows.
Graph + RAG | Agentic pipelines | Cross-team lead
CTO | Multi-cloud | 2015-2018
Hired and managed 12+ engineers across disciplines. Bridged AWS, Azure and GCP with Terraform; secured a Series A round through technical due diligence with the lead investor.
12+ hires | Series A closed | 3-cloud delivery
How I work
Hands-on technical leadership for founders, CEOs and investors. Architecture, hiring, delivery, due diligence, plus the code where it matters.
Production AI, not demos. Multi-model orchestration, agentic workflows, evolutionary algorithms, RAG over graph data, real-time voice and video.
Payment rails, regulated systems and resilient platforms at exchange-grade scale. Cloud bills that match the workload, not the hype.
Most senior tech people do one of these well. I get pulled in when an engagement needs all three at once: regulated systems, applied AI, and the engineering org behind both.
AI focus
Treating LLMs as fallible reviewers. Run GPT-5, o3 and Gemini in parallel with persona-based critique, convergence detection and majority-vote aggregation, instead of trusting one model.
LangGraph-based multi-agent pipelines with tool-use, retries and structured outputs. Risk-adjusted scoring (NPV, CAPEX, likelihood) wraps generation loops to keep ideas grounded.
Generation, enrichment, ranking, with offspring and wildcard splits for explore vs. exploit balance. Most of the lift happens in the first five generations; the rest is calibration.
OpenAI Realtime API + LiveKit + WebRTC for live AI avatar interactions, currently powering an AI-driven legacy preservation platform from beta to GA.
Neo4j, GraphDB and Spanner as substrate for retrieval-augmented systems where lineage, provenance and traversal matter more than raw vector similarity.
Token-aware design, caching, structured outputs and JSON-schema enforcement. Cut ML infra costs by 98% on one engagement through a serverless redesign. Same workload, sane bill.
Author
The Power of Technical Blogging in Tech Careers, a practical guide for engineers stepping into leadership without losing their edge. Available on Amazon and at CoderToCTO.com.
"Perl, the only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption."
Keith Bostic
Let's talk
Open to fractional CTO engagements, advisory work, technical due diligence and AI/ML system builds. Corp-to-corp, remote-first, Toronto-based, working with teams worldwide.
