There's no CTO yet.
You need someone to set the direction, hire the first engineers, and stay close to the product. I've been a founder twice: Firefly, an early Dubai digital agency, then Luminescent, run across Dubai and India.
CTO at AIR and Day2 Health
AI-native CTO for high-stakes delivery
I'm a fractional, founding and recovery CTO. Founders, investors and scaleups call me when the technology matters and the situation is messy.
When to call me
The problem is rarely just technical.
The scaleup is moving but releases keep slipping.
The team's busy and the roadmap keeps changing, but too little reaches customers. I find the blockers and get things shipping again.
A build is in trouble and you need the truth.
Maybe an outsourced build has gone quiet, or nobody can say when anything will land. I work out what's really going on, say it plainly, and turn it into a recovery plan you can hold people to.
You want AI that actually speeds up delivery.
I build pipelines where AI writes, reviews and documents, and a human signs off anything that touches money or health data.
Current work
CTO across two live product companies.
AI-driven security risk platform
A platform for security risk assessments: assets, threats, vulnerabilities and on-site surveys, with AI generating suggestions and reports from external threat intelligence. The AI-native pipeline behind it has roughly trebled engineering throughput.
Health platform for Parkinson's management
A wellness companion for the day-to-day of Parkinson's: a mobile app, an admin platform, API and cloud infrastructure.
Proof
Recent hands-on work, plus twenty years of scale behind it.
Rebuilt in about 15 days
The founders had been let down by a failed outsourced build. I put the replacement Parkinson's platform live on serverless AWS, logged 47 architecture decisions on the way, and stayed on as CTO.
An AI-driven platform in production
The platform runs five event-driven services with provider fallback across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. A 14-agent delivery fleet is built and committed in the repo.
Autonomous delivery loop
Deliveratron took work from plan to code to review to merge on its own: 183 PRs in 12 active days, each reviewed independently across three model providers.
Stalled to shipping in weeks
The programme had stalled when I arrived. I pulled together teams across Dubai, London and Stockholm to build one experience across web and mobile, in React and React Native.
28 days to seconds
At Scottish Widows I moved pension contribution processing onto cloud-native microservices and a 28-day back-office process came down to seconds. I also took the group's Open Banking Lab, around 175 engineers, through a cloud migration to GCP.
One small team, 90+ brands
Formed and led ten people who layered composable microservices over a legacy CMS. Content changes that had taken weeks started going out in seconds.
How I work
Move fast. Don't break things.
Diagnose first
I can read the code, and I do. But I'm also looking at the team, the roadmap and the promises already made, because problems are rarely where people first point.
Stabilise, then accelerate
Fragile systems and unclear ownership slow everyone down. Speed comes back once they're fixed.
Governance that can't be switched off
AI takes real drag out of delivery. Judgement on money, health data and compliance stays with humans, behind gates built into the pipeline itself.
Good fit
Where I do my best work.
Founders, investors, scaleups and small consultancies: people who want a straight answer quickly and are ready to act once the plan is clear. I'm based between the UK and the Gulf, where I lived for eight years, and I work globally.
Not a fit
Where I don't.
Slow, committee-led corporate programmes. I spent years in that world and know it well, but I'm more useful with small senior teams that want pace and someone willing to get into the details.
Contact
Let's talk.
Book a call if you're starting something new, digging a project out of trouble, or you want a fractional CTO before a full-time hire makes sense.