Fractional and interim CTO
I'm Fin. For 12 years I've led technology at start-ups and scale-ups, from a founder's first team to infrastructure behind billions in monthly payments. I step in for founders and boards who need a technology leader now: to steady delivery, control cost and risk, and build the team that takes over when I leave.
Where I've led
VirtuverseFounderHow I help
Your CTO has left, or you've outgrown the founding engineer. I cover the gap, keep the team steady, and help you hire the permanent leader.
Deadlines slip and nobody can say why. I put clear goals and measures in place so the board can see progress, and the team can make it.
Cloud and tooling bills climbing faster than revenue. I've taken $800k a year out of one bill and kept a 9x increase in load from multiplying another.
Investors and acquirers look hard at technology. I've owned security and compliance for PCI and financial auditors, and I work in governance, security and trust today.
After a merger I unified infrastructure teams of 40+ across time zones, and didn't lose a single person we wanted to keep.
Past the demos: I build and run AI agent systems myself, and can tell your team where they will genuinely save time and where they won't.
Engagements
Full time, for a fixed term
I run technology while you search for a permanent leader, then hand over a stable team and a clear plan.
One to three days a week
Senior leadership for companies that need it but not full time yet: strategy, hiring, budgets and the board relationship.
Focused and short
Technical due diligence, architecture and cost reviews, or a trusted technology voice for the board.
Approach
Every team owns a few measures that tie to the business: delivery, quality, cost and customer outcomes. Progress stops being a matter of opinion.
Teams shaped around the product, so each can move without waiting on the others, and the shape still works at three times the headcount.
Hiring, performance and onboarding that turn the first engineers into the leads and managers who hire the next wave.
Technology costs that grow slower than the business. Architecture is a budget decision as much as a technical one.
Open communication, skip-level conversations and real career growth. Teams that trust their leadership keep their best people.
Success is the team, the measures and the leaders in place, and me no longer needed day to day.
Hands-on
I keep my hands in the work, which is how I stay current on what modern teams and AI tools can really do.
Game studio · Founder
A sci-fi MMORPG with a real cash economy. Players colonise Planet Stig, hunt, craft and trade in an economy where every item past starting gear is made or repaired by another player. Now being rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5.
Founded and ran it as CEO. Built a 15-person team across disciplines and grew to more than 10,000 registered players with almost no marketing spend.
Browser strategy game · Designer and engineer
A persistent strategy game in the browser: build a 3D base on a 3000 by 3000 world generated per season, push inward toward the Fall Site, and command XCOM-style turn-based battles.
Designed and built end to end. Every change is tested against simulated players before it ships, so game balance is measured, not guessed.
Incremental game · Designer and engineer
A browser civilisation-builder in the vein of Kittens Game and Trimps: grow a settlement, research a tech tree and send expeditions into the unknown.
Simulated players test the pacing before real ones do, which caught a boss fight the original design made impossible to win.
AI system · Architect
A voice-first chief-of-staff assistant. It holds the state you would otherwise hold in your head, notices what is slipping, and runs development tasks on an overnight autopilot, reviewing and landing its own changes.
Designed so the data, memory and integrations belong to the owner, not the AI vendor. Switching provider is a small change, not a rewrite.
AI engineering framework · Architect
A spec-driven architecture for autonomous software engineering. One planner model breaks a feature into tightly scoped, contract-bound tasks that cheaper coding agents implement in parallel.
Every change is checked against the contract it was given before it lands, so cheaper AI agents can do real engineering work safely. I use it on my own games.
Community
Entropia Universe is one of the longest-running real cash economy games. For three years I've helped build its player community, running events and building tools that give players a voice with the developers.
$50,000 prize pool
A competitive community event with 52 teams and over 200 players, run on a platform I built.
Ran and moderated community spaces for players, welcomed newcomers, and brought player feedback to the developers.
A place for players to post and vote on ideas, with official accounts so the developers can answer them directly.
Skills
Whether it's a gap to cover, a team to steady or a company getting ready to scale, a 30 minute call is enough to see if I can help.