Fractional CTO Services in Madrid
The best Fractional CTO Services in Madrid, 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.
Madrid is Spain's corporate and financial centre, home to the headquarters of large banks, telecom operators, utilities, construction and insurance groups, as well as the central government. Much software is bought through large integrators and consultancies, and mid-sized companies increasingly want specialists who can deliver a defined piece of AI or data work underneath those relationships.
Mid-sized Madrid companies that have outsourced development to a consultancy often have no one internally who can judge the architecture or the bill. A fractional CTO gives them that view, part time, and works with the existing supplier.
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 EUR, 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
AI Data Analyst
Madrid's large companies and their mid-sized suppliers run on databases that finance and operations teams query constantly through a few overloaded analysts. A read-only analyst inside their own cloud gives them answers quickly without new data leaving their control.
What Madrid 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
GDPR is enforced in Spain by the AEPD (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos), an active enforcer, alongside the national LOPDGDD. Spain created AESIA, the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence, as its lead AI Act authority, and a draft organic law on the good use and governance of AI was before the Cortes in 2026 and should be checked for its final form. Spain had not yet completed NIS2 transposition at the time of writing, so the earlier Royal Decree-law 12/2018 still applies, and suppliers to the public sector work to the Esquema Nacional de Seguridad. DORA has applied to banks and insurers since January 2025, and most EU AI Act high-risk duties are now due from December 2027.
Contracting and payment
You contract with an individual consultant based in India. Invoices in EUR or USD, paid by Wise or bank transfer. Your accountant handles an overseas supplier in the usual way, and any documentation they need is provided before access is granted.
Working hours
Four or more hours of daily overlap across your morning, Central European time, with same-day replies on working days.
Can you work as a subcontractor to our integrator?
Yes. That is a common arrangement in Madrid. The integrator holds the contract and the client relationship, and we deliver the AI or data component underneath, with acceptance criteria agreed in writing and code delivered into the client's repositories.
What does AESIA mean for an AI project in Spain?
AESIA supervises the EU AI Act in Spain, and the national AI law that will set its full powers was still going through parliament. We classify each system against the AI Act and document its use, so you are ready whichever final form the law takes.
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.