Fractional CTO Services

Dilex Networks’ Fractional CTO services are your startup’s secret weapon, ready to supercharge your growth and drive innovation across multiple key areas!

Team Development

Younger teams often benefit from just need having experience mentors to bounce ideas off and validate their ideas and concepts before investing significant development resources. I focus on fostering a collaborative environment where team members feel comfortable asking any questions, no matter how basic they may seem. My goal is to empower the engineering, instilling the confidence needed to break down complex problems into manageable components.

• mentor the team on software engineering best practices
• support professional development through team presentations, sharing on-line resources and books
• assist with hiring processes/interviewing prospective employees

Product Design

My main goal here is to understand the product’s short, medium and long term goals of the product as these will directly influence the structure of the system architecture. Getting the architecture right from the start is crucial since it becomes increasingly challenging to refactor as the product evolves. System architecture involves numerous choices and trade-offs, so having a clear vision of future product requirements can greatly inform and simplify these decisions. To that end, understanding long-term goals is essential when designing and building robust systems.

• establish product security and compliance requirements
• define product data needs, including data volume, backup strategies, and more.
• determine uptime requirements
• identify product-market fit

System Architecture and Design

It’s essential to deep dive into the latest offerings from AWS and other vendors to determine how we can leverage these technologies to build the product effectively. I always emphasize that the product requirements should take precedence over technical requirements i.e., the technical requirements should not dictate how the product functions or how users interact with it.

• evaluate existing architecture
• Assess current AWS services and other vendor solutions
• refactor existing architecture/systems as needed
• design and build new architecture/systems with a focus on security profiles and cloud cost management
• utilize AWS Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g., Cloudformation, AWS CDK, Terraform) to construct systems on AWS

Software Development and DevOps

I often combine these two areas as modern cloud-based software development demands that all engineers have a solid understanding of DevOps processes. The code being developed is frequently intertwined with cloud services, making this knowledge essential. I’m a hands-on leader, eager to write and review code alongside the team.

• establish code review and release processes
• building reliable automated unit and integration test suites
• implement observability and logging systems/standards
• set up documentation standards