Fractional CTO & Engineering Leader
Senior technical leadership, on your terms.
I help founders turn early products into scalable, AI-ready platforms — with the senior technical judgment of a CTO, without the full-time hire.
$500M+
On-chain volume shipped
Web3 payments platform
2M+
Requests / hour at peak
Headless commerce re-platform
95%
Infrastructure cost cut
Monolith → headless MACH
10+
Years building & leading
0 → 1 and 1 → n
What I do
A CTO's judgment, applied where it matters most.
I plug in across four areas — from first architecture to scaling crisis to AI strategy — and dial each up or down to fit where your company actually is.
0 → 1 Product & Architecture
01Translate a founder's vision into a pragmatic technical strategy and a system that ships fast — and won't need to be torn down at the next stage of growth.
- Technical strategy & roadmap
- System & data architecture
- MVP scoping and hands-on build
- Stack & build-vs-buy decisions
Scale & Cost Engineering
02Take products buckling under growth and make them fast, reliable, and cost-effective to run — proven on platforms serving millions of users.
- Serverless & cloud architecture
- Performance & reliability
- Cloud cost optimization
- Observability & resilience
AI Integration & Strategy
03Add AI where it genuinely moves the needle — and ship it to production, not just a demo. Practical LLM features, automation, and clear build-vs-buy calls.
- LLM & automation in product
- AI build-vs-buy advisory
- Cost, latency & reliability tradeoffs
- AI-accelerated delivery
Engineering Leadership
04Stand up the team, process, and delivery cadence for your first engineering hires — or steady an existing team — so engineering becomes a growth lever, not the thing slowing your roadmap down.
- Team building & mentoring
- Delivery process & rituals
- Hiring & technical due diligence
- Founder & investor communication
My Work
Outcomes, not job titles.
A decade of taking products from idea to scale. Each engagement started with a clear objective and ended with a number. Expand any one to see the challenge and the approach.
The challenge
Hospitality hiring is high-volume and low-conversion: teams drown in unqualified applicants and burn hours on manual screening and interview scheduling. The funnel needed to score and book candidates without a human bottleneck.
Summary
A multi-tenant SaaS that takes hospitality hiring from a flood of applicants to scored, scheduled interviews — with AI and automation doing the heavy lifting.
What I did
- Built a multi-tenant SaaS on Next.js + TypeScript with role-based access control, secure file handling, and monitoring.
- Added AI candidate scoring to automate resume screening and cut time-to-hire.
- Automated the funnel with webhook processing, workflow orchestration, and job-board feeds.
- Wired up SMS interview scheduling, email delivery, and notifications for hands-off candidate processing.
Selected work
Childearn
Jul 2025 — Jan 2026
Child skill-development platform for gated communities, built end-to-end as a mobile app on a serverless AWS backend.
- Shipped a React Native app for iOS and Android with real-time listeners, retry logic for network resilience, rate limiting, and comprehensive error handling.
- Built a serverless API on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, EventBridge) with event- and cron-based workflows for PDF generation, activity scheduling, and community validation — supporting thousands of concurrent users across multiple communities.
Chitti
Jul 2021 — Oct 2021
Newsletter publishing & distribution platform — full-stack Next.js build with a creator dashboard I designed and shipped end-to-end.
- Built the APIs and backend with Next.js and Mongoose.
- Designed and built the website UI and the creator dashboard, from Sketch mockups to a styled-components frontend.
Middle Class Fund
Apr 2020 — Jul 2020
Tech stack for a COVID-19 crisis relief fund — designed the operational flow and shipped it under crisis timelines.
- Designed the operational flow and built a React volunteer dashboard, deployed on Netlify.
- Built the Node.js / Express backend on serverless (AWS Lambda) with MongoDB, scaled with SQS to absorb peak influx from the foundation's website.
Earlier
Engagements
Two ways to work together.
The difference comes down to who owns the roadmap. As your Fractional CTO, I help decide what to build and how. As your Fractional Tech Lead, you own the product — I lead the build. Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a contract.
Fractional CTO
Owns the technical & product roadmap
I run engineering as your part-time CTO — helping decide what to build and how, owning the roadmap and architecture, then leading the team that ships it. A partner in the product decisions, not just the execution.
- Owns the technical & product roadmap
- Shapes what to build, and how
- Architecture & key technical decisions
- Leads & mentors the engineering team
Best for
Founders who need a technical partner in the decisions
Fractional Tech Lead
Executes your roadmap, hands-on
You own the product and the roadmap — I lead the build. Hands-on architecture and delivery against your decisions, turning your vision into shipped, scale-ready software alongside your team.
- Executes against your roadmap
- Hands-on architecture & build
- Leads delivery & engineering quality
- Scale-ready foundations, no product calls
Best for
Founders who own product and need build leadership
Not sure which fits?
Tell me where you are and we'll scope the right level of involvement together.
About
In the code and in the room.
Sriram Kasyap Meduri
Fractional CTO & Engineering Leader
I partner with founders as a fractional CTO: setting technical direction, and architecting systems that stay lean for where you are today while leaving the door open to scale fast the moment growth demands it — without paying upfront for headroom you don't need yet. I'm equally comfortable in the codebase and in the room with founders and investors.
I started as a self-taught developer and spent the last decade taking products from a blank repo to millions of users — across fashion e-commerce, Web3 payments, SaaS, and mobile. Along the way I've led teams, owned architecture, cut a cloud bill by 95%, and shipped systems that moved hundreds of millions of dollars on-chain.
Today I bring that range to founders as a fractional CTO: the technical depth to make the hard calls, the product sense to make them count, and an AI-native way of working that ships more with a smaller team. If you're weighing a build, a rebuild, or where AI fits — that's exactly the conversation I'm here for.
Pragmatic over perfect
Ship the simplest thing that's correct and scalable. Architecture should serve the business, not an ego.
Cost is a feature
I treat the cloud bill like a product metric — I've cut infra costs 95% without sacrificing performance.
AI-native, evidence-led
I bring AI in where it earns its place in production, and I use it daily to ship faster and with more leverage.
Founder-fluent
I translate between code and business — equally at home in the repo and in the room with investors.
At a glance
- Experience10+ years
- RoleFractional CTO / Tech Lead
- StrengthsArchitecture · Scale · AI
- CertificationAWS Cloud Practitioner
- Working withUS & global teams
- Based inIndia · Remote-first
Toolkit
The stack behind the outcomes.
A decade of full-stack and cloud engineering — the languages, frameworks, AWS services, and data stores I reach for to take products from 0 → 1 and scale them to millions of users.
Languages
Frameworks & Libraries
AI & Automation
Cloud & DevOps
Databases & Storage
Tooling
Let's talk
Building something that needs a steady technical hand?
Whether you need a fractional CTO or a fractional tech lead — if it's a hard technical call, it's worth a conversation.
Available for fractional CTO & tech lead engagements