Fractional CTO & technical advisor for AI startups
I help early-stage founders turn an AI idea into a system that ships, scales, and survives diligence — senior technical leadership without the full-time hire. 10+ years building production systems, currently CTO at an AI company, ex-Amazon.
Senior technical leadership, on the terms your stage needs.
Most early AI startups don't need a full-time CTO yet — they need someone senior who has shipped real systems to make the right calls before they become expensive. That's where I come in.
Technical strategy & architecture
Translate the product vision into a pragmatic architecture and roadmap. Choose the stack, the boundaries, and the trade-offs that won't box you in at the next stage.
From prototype to production
Take an LLM demo or notebook and turn it into a reliable, observable, secure product — evals, guardrails, latency and cost under control, not just a happy-path demo.
Hands-on building
I still write code. When the team is small, I build the hard parts myself — APIs, data pipelines, infra — and set the patterns the rest of the codebase follows.
Cloud, infra & DevOps
AWS, Terraform/CDK, CI/CD, and observability done properly from day one. Ship fast without accumulating the kind of debt that stalls you six months in.
Team & hiring
Define the first engineering hires, interview and calibrate candidates, and set up the autonomous, DevOps-minded team culture that lets a small group move fast.
Technical due diligence
A clear-eyed read on an architecture, codebase, or AI claims — for founders preparing to raise, or for investors who need a credible technical assessment.
Flexible engagements that match your runway.
Start small, scale up if it's working. No long lock-ins — the goal is to make myself progressively less necessary.
The sounding board
- Architecture & stack reviews
- Weekly strategy sessions
- On-call for the big decisions
- Hiring & interview support
Embedded leadership
- Own the technical roadmap
- Lead & mentor the team
- Hands-on with the hard parts
- Represent tech to investors
Build the foundation
- 0→1 MVP or core system
- LLM feature productionization
- Cloud / infra setup
- Technical due diligence
A decade of shipping systems that hold up.
From hyperscale advertising infrastructure at Amazon to leading engineering at an AI company today — full ownership, end to end.
Lead architecture and engineering for a platform that turns unstructured documents into structured, actionable insight — cutting case-review time by up to 70% while keeping workflows HIPAA/GDPR-compliant and secure. Own the full stack: LLM pipelines, backend services, cloud infrastructure, and team.
Built Bird CRM — a unified platform for marketing, sales, and payments — working across a large-scale, event-driven microservice architecture serving a global customer base.
Lead developer at a technology-driven mortgage lender. Built the backend — web crawlers and a GraphQL API in TypeScript/Node.js on AWS — owning features end-to-end in a small, fast-moving team.
Designed and shipped "shareable snapshots" — effectively a time machine for the advertising reporting UI — across a Kotlin backend and a React/TypeScript front end at Amazon scale.
The best technical leadership makes itself unnecessary.
I'm Viktor — a software engineer with 10+ years of building high-quality products and untangling hard technical problems. I started in UI and front-end infrastructure (an internal CI/CD platform, before GitHub Actions made that mainstream), then moved deep into backend: scalable systems, APIs, and event-driven microservices — always with performance, reliability, and observability front of mind.
Today I'm CTO at an AI company, which means I live the early-stage AI startup reality every day: shipping LLM-powered features that have to be accurate, secure, and fast — not just impressive in a demo. I bring that same lens to founders as a fractional CTO and advisor.
I care about DevOps culture and fully autonomous teams — I even ran a podcast about it.
Core stack
Infra & AI
Approach
Building something with AI? Let's make sure it's built right.
Book a free 30-minute intro call. Tell me where you are and what's keeping you up at night — I'll tell you straight whether and how I can help.