Fractional CTO

Fractional CTO, Product — StorScale Embedded product and engineering leadership for an AI-native operating company. Company: StorScale (StorScale.ai) — the Storage Intelligence Platform for self-storage operators Arrangement: Fractional, embedded, ongoing. Not a project. Not an agency retainer. Time zone: We run on Central. You work async, but you overlap with us in real time most days. Commitment: Roughly 2 to 3 days a week to start, with room to grow as the product does. Why this role exists StorScale is built the way we think every company will be built in five years: a small human team with a large fleet of AI agents doing the work. We have two products to run, and they matter equally. The first is the customer-facing platform. Self-storage operators use it as their command center for marketing, customer, and pricing intelligence. It is a real SaaS product with real paying operators, real revenue, and a real bar. Enterprise-grade, best in class, no shortcuts. The second is the internal product: the AI-native workflow layer that runs the business itself. Finance, operations, engineering, and coaching are increasingly handled by agents we build and maintain. Our internal team is our second customer, and we hold that product to the same standard as the one we sell. We need one person who can own both. Someone who thinks in product, ships in code, and treats the operator using the dashboard and the operator using the internal agents as two audiences worth designing for. The reality of the work today This is not a greenfield experiment. There is a live product with real usage, a working codebase, a running agent fleet, and an operating business feeding the product real-world signal. You would not be building in the dark. You would be building on top of something that already works and holding it to a higher standard as it grows. What you'll own Customer-facing product Product direction for the StorScale platform: what we build, in what order, and why. The full delivery loop from problem to shipped feature: discovery, spec, build, review, deploy, measure. Product quality and craft. The interface should feel like an intelligence platform, not a dashboard. The health of the codebase: architecture, test coverage, CI discipline, security, performance. Internal workflow product (our second customer) The AI-native operations layer: the agents that handle finance, engineering oversight, operations, and coaching across the business. Turning repeated manual work into durable, tested, automated workflows. Treating internal users as customers: real onboarding, real reliability, real feedback loops, not throwaway scripts. Deciding what a human should do, what an agent should do, and where the handoff lives. Across both Setting the engineering standard and holding the line on it: TDD, CI that must stay green, TypeScript strict mode, comprehensive fixes over piecemeal ones. Being the technical voice in the room when we make product, hiring, and architecture calls. Flagging the risks and opportunities we are not seeing. Say the hard thing early. The stack you'd be working in We are opinionated and modern. You should be fluent here or able to get fluent fast. Frontend: Next.js and TypeScript (strict), deployed on Vercel. The customer app lives at app.storscale.ai. Backend and agents: Node.js services and a scheduled agent fleet, running on Render and GitHub Actions. Data: Supabase and Postgres, with row-level security, branch-based migrations, and a disciplined migration workflow. Payments: Stripe. Observability: Sentry, plus PostHog for product analytics. AI-native layer: Claude-based agents and MCP tooling, running as production workflows rather than experiments. This is the part most engineers have never built at production quality. If you find it exciting rather than intimidating, we will get along. Ways of working: TDD, PR-based review, CI and coverage gates, Notion for product management, Slack for everything else. Who you are You have been a CTO, VP of Engineering, founding engineer, or principal-level product engineer, and you have shipped a real SaaS product that customers paid for. You are genuinely product-minded. You care about the user, the problem, and the outcome, not just the ticket. You still write code and want to. This is a hands-on role, not a slideware role. You have built or seriously worked with LLM-based agents and automation, and you understand where they earn their keep and where they don't. You are comfortable in an early-stage environment with high standards and low ceremony. You would rather ship working code and iterate than wait for perfect. You take a long view. We build things that compound, and we would rather do the reusable foundations properly once than hack them fifty times. How we work together This is the part that matters most, so read it closely. We are not hiring an agency and we are not hiring a freelancer who disappears between deliverables. We are hiring a member of the team who happens to be fractional. The difference shows up in the details: You are in the Slack, in the standups, and in the decisions. Not cc'd on them afterward. You have real ownership and real authority over the product and the codebase, not a scope-of-work you execute against. We share context openly: the strategy, the roadmap, the messy parts. You are inside the tent. The relationship is built to last and to grow. As the product scales, this role can scale with it, including toward a larger or ongoing seat if that is right for both of us. This is an hourly or monthly retainer engagement, paid in cash. We would rather pay well for a smaller slice of a strong operator than a full slice of an average one. If what you want is a series of well-defined projects with clean handoffs, this is not the role. If what you want is to help shape and build a product from the inside, with the standard set high and the autonomy set high to match, this is exactly it.