Fractional Principal
Regular senior engineering judgement for architecture, migrations, and technical direction.
Ongoing technical leadership
Some decisions need sustained attention across releases. A migration changes as constraints emerge, several teams depend on the same data, or delivery pressure repeatedly postpones work on reliability and platform design.
We take an agreed technical leadership role alongside your engineering leads, typically 1–2 days per week. We review designs, identify dependencies and unresolved decisions in the roadmap, and work directly with senior engineers. We take responsibility for technical direction within that remit and follow the decisions into implementation.
When it fits
- Decisions affecting several teams lack a clear owner or keep being reopened.
- A migration or platform change needs senior attention over several releases.
- Feature planning leaves technical dependencies, reliability risks or necessary platform work unaddressed.
- Senior engineers need a regular partner for design decisions and their development as technical leaders.
What we take responsibility for
- Reviewing designs and migration plans against the code, operating constraints, and intended outcome.
- Recording important decisions and establishing a practical way to propose, review, and revisit them.
- Reviewing the roadmap with engineering and product leads, making dependencies and deferred technical risks visible in planning.
- Working with senior engineers through design discussions, code review, pairing, and feedback on how they explain technical choices.
- Following decisions into implementation and revisiting them when the evidence changes.
How we work together
We start with the decisions waiting for attention, how the team currently makes them, and who owns delivery. From there we agree our responsibilities, decision authority, regular working time, and access to the relevant work.
The cadence follows the team’s needs: design reviews, roadmap discussions, and time with engineers working through difficult choices. Written decisions and follow-through matter more than adding meetings.
We review the arrangement as priorities change. This is not a substitute for day-to-day people management or an open-ended allocation of feature development; any substantial implementation work is scoped explicitly.