Fractional
Fractional Backend & Platform Architecture
Staff-level backend and platform guidance for growing engineering teams that need better technical decisions before they need another full-time senior hire.
When fractional makes sense
- The CTO or founder has become the architecture bottleneck
- Senior engineers have no one to escalate a design decision to
- Core systems are getting risky to change and everyone knows it
- Hiring a Staff or Principal engineer is premature, but the gap is real
What I do
- Architecture and system-design reviews
- Design and RFC review before the work starts
- Authentication, sessions and multi-tenancy
- Data models and API boundaries
- Event-driven flows, queues and asynchronous work
- Cloud, cost and reliability decisions
- Critical code review
- Production incident support
- Mentoring senior and mid-level engineers
How I work
- Recurring weekly availability, agreed up front
- Decisions written down, so they survive the conversation
- Asynchronous review wherever it works better than a meeting
- Direct work with your existing team, not around them
Engagement shapes
Low-touch. Architecture review and escalation when something specific comes up.
- Async escalation
- Architecture sessions as needed
Around 20 hours a month. Embedded enough to hold context across initiatives.
- Recurring weekly architecture and design review
- Async RFC and code review
- Ongoing context across initiatives
Around 40 hours a month. Hands on the code as well as the design.
- Everything in Fractional Architect
- Hands-on implementation on critical paths
The hour ranges describe reserved monthly capacity, not a requirement to manufacture billable tasks. What the engagement actually needs tends to become clear in the first month, and the shape can move.
What should improve
- Fewer architecture decisions blocked on the CTO
- Clearer technical direction the team can act on
- Risky designs caught earlier, when changing them is still cheap
- More consistent patterns across the backend
- Better technical leverage from the engineers you already have
- Less pressure toward a rewrite driven by accumulated architecture debt
What this does not replace
- Not an interim people manager
- Not a ticket-taking contractor
- Not outsourced ownership of your engineering organization
This is a technical seat. It works alongside whoever owns people and delivery, not instead of them.
Good fit
Growing SaaS teams. Founder or CTO-led engineering organizations. Roughly 2–30 engineers. Products where backend complexity is outgrowing the technical structure around it.