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Fractional CTO or senior AI engineer Retainer

Fractional CTO for AI startups and SaaS teams

A fractional CTO, or a senior AI engineer, on retainer: the calls a CTO would make, without hiring one full-time. On most projects I am the only senior engineer, and I run my own AI SaaS in production, Evoriqa.

Email mecontact@alihassan.dev

Who it is for

  • Startups adding AI to a product with real users.
  • Teams without a senior engineer to make architecture calls.
  • Founders who need technical leadership before they can hire a full-time CTO.

What the work covers

  • Technical strategy and roadmap: architecture direction, build or buy, stack and vendor choices.
  • Hiring: defining roles, vetting engineers, onboarding, and leading the team.
  • Investor questions and technical due diligence.
  • Delivery process: releases, code review, CI/CD and security basics.
  • A written plan before any code: model choice, retrieval design, how output gets checked, and a cost and speed budget.
  • Architecture decisions: retrieval, models, tenancy, cost.
  • Hands-on build work alongside your team.
  • Code review, and a codebase the next engineer can read.
  • Working in your repository, your chat and your standups, with days per week agreed per engagement.
  • No lock-in, as I prefer to work: your accounts, your infrastructure, and a documented handover.

Proof

  • AI reply grounded in cited help-centre content, shadow-mode draft metrics per channel, and metered AI credits in billing.

    Evoriqa

    My own SaaS: a multi-tenant AI customer-support platform, live in production, built by the person who also pays its inference bill.

    • Next.js
    • TypeScript
    • PostgreSQL
  • Food catalogue with macro-mismatch checks, ingredient nutrition table with quality scores, and the exercise library of a calorie-tracking console.

    AI fitness app admin panel

    The daily operations console for a calorie-tracking app with 20K+ users: users, subscriptions, food and ingredient databases, exercises and app settings.

    • Next.js
    • React
    • TypeScript

Questions

What's the difference between the CTO and engineer levels?
The CTO level adds the leadership work: strategy and roadmap, hiring and leading engineers, investor and due-diligence questions, and delivery process. The engineer level is hands-on build work and architecture calls. Most engagements mix both, and the split is agreed in writing at the start.
Will you work with our existing team?
Yes. My preference is to work in your repository and process, so nothing depends on me afterwards.
What kind of work have you done this way?
Long-running engineering on live products, such as the operations console for a calorie-tracking app with 20K+ users.

Tell me what you’re building and where it’s stuck.

I’ll tell you the cleanest path forward, including if it’s “don’t build that.”

Email me

Or write tocontact@alihassan.dev

Ali Hassan in a dark winter jacket, looking off to one side, standing in a stone courtyard with a minaret and cloudy sky behind him.