Fractional CTO / Technical Advisor — Oversight & Review for Non-Technical Founder

# Fractional CTO / Technical Advisor — Oversight & Review for Non-Technical Founder **~3–6 hrs/week · Ongoing · Remote** ## The role in one line I'm a non-technical founder with a small engineering team building a live platform. I need a senior technical advisor in my corner to review the work, own merge approvals, watch for security risks, and help me make technical decisions I can't evaluate on my own. ## Context We're a US-based merchant services / payment processing company building an internal operating platform (merchant boarding, dashboards, CRM integrations, lightweight AI assist). The platform is real and in active development. I have one capable full-stack engineer building it. I make the product and business calls — but I can't read code or judge architecture, and I don't want to be the bottleneck (or the blind spot) on technical decisions. ## What I need from you This is **review, oversight, and advisory** — not hands-on building. My engineer builds; you make sure it's being built right. - **Code & merge review** — review pull requests, approve merges (especially anything touching auth, security, or payments), and tell me in plain English what's sound and what's risky. - **Security oversight** — we handle sensitive merchant data and live API keys. Watch for the things I can't see: exposed secrets, access/permission misconfigurations, missing MFA, insecure infrastructure. - **Architecture sanity-checks** — is the approach sound, scalable, and not creating future problems? - **Infrastructure review** — we're deploying to AWS (EC2, Postgres, etc.). Confirm it's set up correctly and securely. - **Be my translator and gut-check** — when a technical decision lands on my desk that I can't evaluate, you help me make it. ## Our stack (so you can self-assess fit) - Frontend: Next.js / React (TypeScript), on Vercel - Backend: Python / FastAPI, Postgres - Infra: AWS (EC2, EBS, Docker), GitHub Actions CI/CD - Auth: Clerk (JWT, RBAC) - Monitoring: Sentry - Integrations: CRM APIs, some Anthropic/LLM agent work ## You're a strong fit if you - Have real senior / staff / CTO-level experience owning production systems — not just shipping features - Can review across this stack and explain risk clearly and patiently to a non-technical founder - Take security and access management seriously (priority for us) - Are reliable part-time and responsive when something is blocking - Bonus: fintech / payments / PCI-adjacent experience ## How we'd start I'd like to begin with a **paid trial task** before any ongoing arrangement: review a few current pull requests and our AWS setup, and tell me what you find. It's a low-risk way for us both to see if it's a fit. Access is granted through your own named accounts (read/review level to start), under a mutual NDA. ## Logistics - Commitment: ~3–6 hrs/week to start, ongoing; may flex up during our current AWS deployment. - Start: soon — we have an active deployment and pull requests awaiting review. ## To apply In your proposal: 1. Briefly describe a time you caught a serious technical or security issue a non-technical stakeholder would have missed. 2. Tell me your experience with our specific stack (FastAPI, Next.js, AWS, Clerk). 3. Skip the boilerplate — I'm reading for judgment and clarity, not buzzwords.