Fractional CTO Services in Edinburgh
The best Fractional CTO Services in Edinburgh, at the best available price.
You have engineers, or contractors, or an agency, and no one whose job is to decide whether the architecture, the spend and the hiring plan are right. That is the gap: ten to twenty hours a month from someone who has built and run the thing you are building, and who will tell you when you are about to spend money you do not need to.
Edinburgh combines a large financial services sector, including banks, asset managers and insurers, with one of Europe's leading computer science schools at the University of Edinburgh. The startup scene leans towards fintech, data and AI, and many companies sell to the financial institutions on their doorstep.
University spinouts in Edinburgh often have a strong research lead and nobody owning engineering. A fractional CTO fills that role part time.
What you get
- Architecture decisions made and written down, with the trade-offs stated rather than assumed
- Infrastructure and AI spend reviewed against what you actually use, not what you provisioned
- Hiring: what roles you need next, what to test for, and which hires to delay
- A technical voice in investor and customer conversations when you need one
- Honest counsel on build versus buy, including when the answer is to buy
Scoped to the hours you actually need. Month to month, with no long lock-in, because a fractional CTO you cannot leave is just an expensive employee.
Invoiced in USD or GBP, payable by Wise or bank transfer.
Request a callback
You speak to the engineer who does the work. No sales rep, no deck.
Who builds here
On-Premise LLM Deployment
Edinburgh's asset managers, banks and insurers want AI over confidential financial data, and keeping the model inside their own environment is usually what gets it approved.
What Edinburgh companies build with us
Get it built at $0.
That is not a discount. It is when you pay. The work is split into checkpoints with acceptance criteria written down before anything starts, and each checkpoint is invoiced only after you have seen it and accepted it. No deposit.
- $0 to start
- You hold every dollar until a checkpoint is delivered and you accept it. No approval, no invoice.
- Fixed cost, unlimited features
- Or hire the team outright: one fixed monthly cost, unlimited feature development, any stack.
- The engineer takes your call
- The person on your first call is the one who architects and writes it. No account managers, no bench time.
A US agency quotes $50,000 to $150,000 for the same build and asks for 40 to 50% of it before a line is written. Account managers, project managers, sales commission and bench time. None of it appears in your product.
Three stages, nothing hidden.
Twenty-minute call
We work out whether you need a fractional CTO at all. Plenty of teams need one good senior engineer instead, and that is a cheaper answer worth hearing.
First month, diagnostic
Architecture, infrastructure spend, delivery process and team shape reviewed, with the findings written down plainly and prioritised by what they cost you.
Ongoing retainer
A fixed block of hours each month. Regular reviews, decisions when they are needed, and direct access rather than a ticket queue.
What actually applies here.
Regulation and data
UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply in Scotland as in the rest of the UK, and financial firms answer to the FCA and the PRA. Scotland's public sector publishes its AI use on the Scottish AI Register, and NHS Scotland has its own information governance requirements. Asset managers in particular will ask about data handling and model risk before any AI pilot.
Contracting and payment
You contract with an individual consultant based in India, not a UK company. Invoices can be issued in GBP or USD and paid by Wise or bank transfer. Your accountant will treat an overseas supplier in the usual way; any paperwork they need is provided before work begins.
Working hours
Full UK working-day overlap. Calls at whatever hour suits your team, and no waiting a day for an answer.
Can you work with model risk requirements?
Yes. We document how the model is used, its limits and how it is tested and monitored, which is what model risk teams review, and keep a person in the loop for consequential outputs.
Do you work with Glasgow and the rest of Scotland?
Yes. The work is remote with full UK working hours, so anywhere in Scotland is the same.
Do we actually need a fractional CTO?
Often not, and you will be told so. If the real problem is that nobody is building fast enough, a senior engineer is a better spend. A fractional CTO earns its cost when the expensive decisions are the bottleneck: architecture, infrastructure spend, build versus buy, and who to hire next.
How is this different from an advisor?
An advisor gives opinions. This role makes decisions, writes them down, and is accountable for them. Where it helps, the work is done rather than delegated, including the parts that involve opening the codebase.
What happens to our existing team?
They keep building. The role is to remove the decisions that block them and to be honest with you about where the team is short, which is usually a smaller gap than founders fear.
Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership, 10-20 hrs/month: architecture, AI strategy, cost control.