Fractional CTO Services in San Diego
The best Fractional CTO Services in San Diego, 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.
San Diego's technology economy rests on life sciences around Torrey Pines, wireless and semiconductor engineering, a large defence and Navy presence, and UC San Diego. Companies here are often engineering-led and research heavy, and many are regulated by the FDA or by defence contracts rather than by consumer markets.
Research-led San Diego companies often need someone to own software architecture, security and hiring while the founders run the science. A fractional CTO covers that 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, 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 Development Company
San Diego's biotech and engineering companies want AI over specialised research and technical data, and that work needs careful production engineering more than another chatbot.
What San Diego 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
California's privacy law (the CCPA as amended by the CPRA) applies across the state, and California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act adds health privacy duties that reach some digital health apps HIPAA does not. Biotech companies work under FDA expectations for data integrity, and defence suppliers handle controlled technical data under export rules and the Defense Department's cybersecurity requirements. Each of these limits where data can go before any AI tool is chosen.
Contracting and payment
You contract with an individual consultant based in India rather than a US entity. Invoices are issued in USD and paid by Wise or bank transfer, with no payroll and no benefits load on your side. Whatever documentation your finance team or counsel needs from an overseas contractor is provided before work starts.
Working hours
Calls in your morning, Pacific time, and work handed over at the end of your day so the next round of changes is waiting when you start.
Does California's medical information law apply to our health app?
It can, even where HIPAA does not, because it reaches some businesses that offer software or hardware handling medical information. We build consent and access controls for it, and your counsel confirms scope.
Can you work on defence-related projects?
Only on parts that do not involve controlled technical data. We do not hold a US security clearance, so controlled data stays with your cleared staff and we work on unclassified components and synthetic data.
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.