Fractional CTO - Part-time - NA/EU/India

About the Role

We’re seeking a Fractional CTO to provide high-level technical leadership and strategic oversight for our fast-scaling mobile application. You will guide architecture decisions, mentor the engineering team, and ensure our backend and infrastructure are built to support high traffic, multi-region deployments, and enterprise-grade performance.

This is a lean engagement (3–5 hours/week) ideal for an experienced technology leader who thrives in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and high-scale environments — and who enjoys shaping the technology strategy of a rapidly growing product.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Define and oversee the long-term architecture of a NestJS + TypeScript microservices platform.
• Ensure scalability, reliability, and modularity across backend services.
• Provide technical input on complex backend decisions (e.g., data partitioning, event-driven workflows, high availability strategies).

Infrastructure Oversight

• Advise on scaling and performance tuning for PostgreSQL / AWS Aurora, including replication and sharding strategies.
• Oversee Kafka event pipelines for robust inter-service communication.
• Guide infrastructure teams on Kubernetes (EKS) deployment strategies for multi-regional clusters.
• Ensure strong CI/CD practices, including rollback strategies, automated testing, and zero-downtime deployments.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor backend and DevOps engineers, setting coding and architectural standards.
• Review critical code and infrastructure changes, ensuring best practices are followed.

Strategic Advisory

• Work closely with founders and product teams to align technical roadmaps with business goals.
• Evaluate new technologies and guide GPU/Lambda-based deployments (e.g., Runpod serverless, Lambda CPU model deployments).
• Ensure security, compliance, and performance benchmarks are met.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including leadership roles.
• Proven experience architecting NestJS + TypeScript microservices at scale.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL / AWS Aurora, Kafka, and Kubernetes (EKS).
• Strong understanding of AWS multi-region architecture and CI/CD pipelines.
• Track record of scaling infrastructure for high-traffic consumer mobile applications.
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with GraphQL, Prometheus / Grafana, ELK stack, or Terraform.
• Experience with GPU workloads or ML deployment pipelines.
• Prior experience in a startup or fractional CTO capacity.