You have an engineering team. They ship code. But when it comes to the decisions that actually shape your business – architecture choices, build-versus-buy tradeoffs, hiring strategy, technical due diligence – there is no one at the table with the experience to make those calls with confidence. You have become the de facto CTO, not because you wanted the role, but because no one else stepped up.
A full-time CTO hire at this stage is a $350K-to-$500K commitment, a months-long search, and a bet on someone who may not have operated at the scale your investors expect. A fractional CTO engagement gives you senior tech leadership embedded in your organization within days, not quarters.
Develomentor engagements are led by senior practitioners with deep operational experience — not advisory work delivered through slide decks. Our consultants attend your leadership meetings, review architecture decisions, set engineering process, evaluate your team, and advise on hiring — with direct accountability for outcomes. Grant Ingersoll, Develomentor’s founder and lead consultant, brings that practitioner depth to every engagement: as CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, he led 18 engineering teams and over 150 employees powering one of the ten most-visited sites on Earth. Before that, he co-founded Lucidworks and built its engineering organization from the ground up, scaling to 50-plus engineers shipping production systems used by Fortune 500 companies.
That practitioner depth is what separates Develomentor from firms staffed by people who have not built anything in a decade. Grant is an Apache Lucene committer and the author of “Taming Text.” He has led engineering organizations, shipped production software at global scale, and navigated the messy realities of technical debt, team dysfunction, and roadmap misalignment that executives actually face.
Most fractional CTOs outsource technical judgment on AI and search to whatever vendors their team is already using. Grant does not. As co-founder and CTO of Lucidworks, a core Apache Lucene committer, and the author of Taming Text, he brings hands-on depth to AI strategy, search architecture, NLP pipeline design, and ML model integration — the specific domains where bad decisions compound fastest. When you need to evaluate a RAG architecture, assess a vendor’s relevance claims, or lead an ML initiative from diagnosis to production, that work stays inside the engagement.
Fractional CTO services work best for PE- and VC-backed growth companies, global enterprises navigating technology transitions, and founders who need a technical peer they can trust. If your engineering decisions are being made ad hoc and your product roadmap has drifted from your business goals, that gap is costing you more than you think. Book a call to discuss where Develomentor can close it.
