The Fractional Principal

What It Is

A long-term, retainer-based partnership providing consistent, high-level technical leadership and architectural oversight to your team, typically for 1-2 days per week. This service gives you the strategic value of an experienced Principal Engineer without the cost and commitment of a full-time executive hire.

This Service is For You If

• You are a growth-stage company whose engineering team is highly talented but lacks the senior, strategic experience to navigate complex architectural decisions.
• Your CTO is increasingly pulled into business and management duties and needs a trusted partner to own the technical strategy and mentor the senior engineering staff.
• You need to establish a strong architectural practice, including design reviews, RFC processes, and technical roadmapping, but lack the internal expertise to lead the initiative.
• You want to provide your senior engineers with regular mentorship from a practicing architect to accelerate their growth into future technical leaders.

Key Outcomes & Deliverables

• Improved Decision Velocity: Consistently better and faster architectural decisions, preventing technical drift and ensuring your platform evolves in a scalable, coherent way.
• Accelerated Team Growth: Your senior engineers will level up their skills through direct mentorship, code reviews, and pairing sessions with a seasoned expert.
• A Proactive Technical Roadmap: A forward-looking technical strategy that aligns with your business goals, ensuring technology is an enabler, not a blocker.
• Direct Access to Senior Expertise: Your team has a direct line to a trusted advisor for their most challenging technical problems, providing on-demand guidance when it matters.
• This is a recurring service with ongoing deliverables, including:
  • Weekly Architectural Review Meetings.
  • Bi-weekly 1:1 Mentoring Sessions with key engineers.
  • Quarterly Technical Strategy Reviews & Roadmap Updates.
  • As-needed participation in critical technical design discussions.

Our Process

Onboarding & Alignment

We integrate with your team, understand your current roadmap and challenges, and establish a clear rhythm for meetings and collaboration. We define 1-2 key objectives for the first quarter.

Ongoing Engagement

We execute on the agreed-upon rhythm of mentorship, governance, and strategic planning, becoming a seamless extension of your leadership team.

Quarterly Review

We review progress against our objectives, assess the impact of our engagement, and define new goals for the upcoming quarter, ensuring the partnership continuously delivers high value.