Senior engineering leadership without the full-time hire

Fractional CTO for Funded SaaS Startups

Make the right technical decisions, scale confidently, and eliminate engineering chaos -- without hiring a full-time CTO.

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The Problem Startups Face

Most startups don't fail from lack of code. They fail from bad technical decisions, unpredictable engineering, and systems that break when customers arrive. You don't need a full-time CTO yet -- but you can't afford to operate without senior technical leadership.

Who This Is For

Tech Swamy supports founders who are building SaaS products and need senior engineering leadership to guide architecture, teams, and execution. Ideal for Seed to Series B startups with 15-30 engineers, especially if you're:

Scaling fast

Managing junior-heavy teams

Relying on agencies

Struggling with tech debt or reliability

Making architectural decisions without confidence

The Tech Swamy Solution

Senior technical leadership designed for founders who need engineering to move faster, safer, and in the right direction.

1. Architectural Clarity & Technical Roadmapping

Every SaaS startup hits the same wall: the early architecture stops supporting new features, customer growth, or enterprise demands. Without a clear technical roadmap, engineering becomes reactive and brittle.

What this solves:

Avoids future rewrites (₹25-60L problem)
Prevents systems from breaking under scale
Eliminates weeks of wasted engineering effort
Stops "random feature building" with no strategic direction

What you get:

A clear, founder-friendly architecture plan + a 6-12 month technical roadmap that aligns engineering output with business goals.

2. Engineering Process Stability & Predictability

Most startups operate with inconsistent planning, unclear definitions of done, and velocity that fluctuates wildly. This causes missed releases, lower morale, and founder frustration.

What this solves:

Shields you from delivery unpredictability
Removes chaos caused by poor sprints, no reviews, or rushed deployments
Helps junior engineers produce senior-level outcomes
Reduces turnaround time for features

What you get:

A stable engineering rhythm -- clear estimation, predictable velocity, disciplined reviews, and high-quality releases.

3. Code & Quality Oversight (Without Writing the Code)

Founders usually don't know if code being written today will survive the next year. Most tech debt isn't accidental -- it's invisible until it becomes expensive.

What this solves:

Catches architectural mistakes before they metastasize
Prevents tech debt pileup from junior developers
Avoids production issues that derail timelines
Ensures long-term maintainability

What you get:

A senior technical guardian who ensures the system is healthy without doing hands-on development.

4. Vendor & Agency Oversight

Agencies often deliver velocity but not long-term architecture maturity. Without oversight, they over-engineer simple things, under-engineer critical paths, or hide poor decisions.

What this solves:

Prevents overcharging, under-delivery, and opacity
Guarantees the architecture isn't a time bomb
Ensures agency output meets engineering standards
Stops "we have to rebuild this because the agency messed up" moments

What you get:

A CTO-level reviewer who protects your interests and ensures the agency builds for long-term success, not short-term timelines.

5. Team Leadership & Developer Enablement

Junior-heavy teams often lack the guardrails needed to deliver at the pace founders expect. Without leadership, they produce inconsistent quality, tech debt, or siloed knowledge.

What this solves:

Prevents burnout due to over-reliance on your best devs
Eliminates guesswork ("is the team doing the right things?")
Stops slow delivery resulting from unclear expectations
Reduces mistakes made due to inexperience

What you get:

A guided team that moves faster, makes fewer mistakes, and grows into a high-performing unit.

6. Founder Clarity Sessions

Founders don't need engineering jargon. They need someone who can translate complex technical decisions into business clarity.

What this solves:

Removes the anxiety of "I don't know what's really happening technically"
Gives you confidence in direction, costs, and timelines
Helps you make decisions without depending on developers' preferences
Provides peace of mind during scaling phases

What you get:

A technical strategic partner you can trust -- weekly clarity sessions plus direct async decision support.

7. AI Architecture & Product Strategy (Premium Tier)

Startups are rushing AI features into their product without understanding model selection, retrieval design, vector storage, latency tradeoffs, or real-world AI failure modes.

What this solves:

Prevents wasted AI experimentation
Avoids unreliable MVP AI features that break in production
Stops startups from building hype-driven, architecturally unsound AI components
Eliminates dependency on devs who lack LLM experience

What you get:

A scaling-ready AI architecture, clear workflows for your AI features, and guidance that ensures AI initiatives actually drive business value.

Who Am I

Fractional CTO & Founder Partner

I'm Vijay Rangan -- an engineering leader with 10+ years of experience building and scaling products at world-class companies like ThoughtWorks, Postman, GoPay, and Nubank.

I've led architecture, engineering strategy, and high-stakes technical decisions for systems used by millions, and I currently advise Terrascope as their long-term fractional CTO.

Along the way, I've also built and launched my own SaaS product (Needfull), giving me a founder's perspective on what it takes to ship, scale, and operate a SaaS business under real-world constraints.

I combine deep engineering expertise with practical, business-first decision-making -- so your technical direction stays aligned with product velocity, customer needs, and long-term scalability.