Fractional CTO
A CTO for the hours you actually need.
You need someone senior to own the technical side, but not a full-time executive yet. As your fractional CTO I set the architecture, keep delivery honest and make the calls on AI and infrastructure, around 20 hours a week, answering to you rather than to a ticket queue.
Fit
Who it is for
- Non-technical founders building their first product, who need someone to trust on the technical side.
- Startups with a team or an agency shipping code, but nobody senior deciding how it should be built.
- Companies adding AI to an existing product who want it done properly, not as a demo.
- Founders preparing to hire their first engineers, or to replace a team that is not working.
Scope
What I take on
- Architecture and stack decisions, made to scale so the product does not need a rebuild later.
- A technical roadmap tied to your business goals, with estimates you can plan around.
- Review of the code and pull requests that matter, and the standards the rest should follow.
- Oversight of whoever builds it: your engineers, an outside agency, or the devmonks team.
- AI decisions: where models help, which ones to use, and how to keep costs and risks in check.
- Infrastructure, security basics, releases and the cost of running it all.
Engagement
How the engagement works
- Time
- Around 20 hours a week
- Minimum term
- Three months
- Updates
- Written, every working day
- Calls
- A weekly review, plus an agreed overlap window
- Build team
- Yours, an agency's, or devmonks'
Why fractional
Senior judgement without the full-time hire
Most early products do not need forty hours of CTO a week. They need the right decisions made early, by someone who has shipped before: which stack, what to build first, what to leave out, who to hire. Around twenty hours a week covers that, and the three-month minimum is long enough to set the foundations and see them hold.
When you are ready for a full-time CTO, the role is already defined, the codebase is documented and the next person starts from a working system rather than a guess.
Time zones
Working with teams in the US, Europe and the Gulf
I work from Dhaka, at UTC+6. That is two hours ahead of the UAE and three ahead of Saudi Arabia, so Gulf teams share most of the working day. Central Europe and the UK overlap in their morning. With the United States the overlap is shorter, so we fix a regular window for calls at the start and everything else runs on written daily updates.
The way devmonks works is built for distance: daily written updates, a demo every week and a fresh build on staging every couple of days, so you never wait for a meeting to know where things stand.
Background
Who you would be working with
I am Saiful Islam, CTO and co-founder of devmonks, with more than eight years of shipping mobile, web and AI products. Before devmonks I was a lead engineer at Apexive for five years and the largest contributor to its open-source Odoo LLM toolkit. I co-founded JoldiApp in Dhaka and did every job in it, and owned iOS releases at Dingi on a maps app downloaded more than a million times.
I hold OpenAI's API Deployment Practitioner and Technical Practitioner certifications, and devmonks is a Select-tier member of the OpenAI Partner Network.
Proof
Work you can check
- Dingi Life, maps and navigation for Bangladesh, downloads at peak
- 1M+
- pin_code_fields, my open-source Flutter package, downloads a month
- 400K
- Odoo LLM, commits as its largest contributor
- 1,492
- Products shipped across mobile, web and AI
- 40+
- devmonks, OpenAI Partner Network
- Select tier
- OpenAI API Deployment and Technical Practitioner
- Certified
Questions
Questions founders ask
What does a fractional CTO do?
Owns the technical side of the company part-time: architecture, the roadmap, code quality, delivery and the build team, plus decisions on infrastructure and AI. In my engagements that is around 20 hours a week.
How long is the minimum engagement?
Three months. It is long enough to set the architecture and the way the team works, and to see it hold.
Do I have to use devmonks to build the product?
No. I can lead your own engineers or an outside agency. devmonks is there if you need a team, not as a condition.
Can you work with a team in another time zone?
Yes. Gulf teams share most of the day with Dhaka and Europe overlaps in its morning; for the United States we agree a fixed window for calls and rely on daily written updates.
Start with one honest call.
Tell me where the product is and where it needs to be. You leave with a clear view of what it needs, whether or not that is me.