Viacheslav Nikolaev

Build.Implement.Hand over.

I’m a fractional CTO for founders without one. In 3 to 6 months I build the team, the delivery process and the AI layer, so the product moves faster and stops depending on a single person. Including me.

How an engagement runs over three to six monthsMy involvement starts high and falls to almost nothing by the end, while the team’s ownership of the system rises from low to full.
  1. Build

    Team, tracker, delivery rhythm

  2. Implement

    AI in the daily work, metrics that show health

  3. Hand over

    Your people own it; I step back

The shape of a typical engagement, 3 to 6 months end to end. A plan, not a measurement.

Who this is for

  • Pre-seed to seed. An early idea or an MVP, first money in or a round on the way.
  • B2B SaaS or an AI product. Something you own and intend to grow.
  • A founder who can’t run engineering. Non-technical, or technical and busy with everything else. You understand the product; you shouldn’t have to manage the developers.
  • There’s a team and it’s chaos, or there’s no team and no obvious first step. You want AI in the work and don’t know where it actually pays off.

Probably not a fit

  • Enterprise. The decision cycle is too slow for this kind of work.
  • A full-time, nine-to-six CTO seat. I’m fractional by design.
  • “One cheap developer for everything.”
  • No product hypothesis yet. Validate first, architecture after.

What stayed after the handover

Early-stage marketplace, Europe

From “a month per task” to predictable delivery

From request to live
Before:up to a monththen6–9 daysNow:1–2 daysSecond version, with my AI orchestration
Change waiting for review
Before:about 4 daysthenabout 2 daysNow:same daySecond version: AI review in the pipeline

A three-person team, a non-technical founder who learned the project status last, and a first version that took a year instead of four months.

Read the case

Alloka, call-tracking SaaS

A CTO for 5–10 hours a week: the outages stopped

Site availability
Before:kept going downAfter:no outages
Server and phone-number bills
Before:full priceAfter:halved

A product on the market since 2010, paying customers, and a site that kept going down. Nobody owned the technology end to end — so the team brought me in.

Read the case

Uplatform, Prague

A new project goes live in ten days instead of two months

Environment for a new project
Before:2 monthsAfter:10 days
Infrastructure team
Before:1 engineerAfter:10–12 in two teams

No dev environment, no production, one infrastructure engineer — me. Five years later: two teams, a department, and a company that does not depend on any one of us.

Read the case

“The broken telephone is gone — the one we had when I didn’t know what was happening with the project at all. Now I understand.”

Founder of the marketplace, translated from Russian

Ways to work together

Hours are a ceiling, not the thing you buy. You pay for the technical side no longer being your problem, and I report on results and decisions, not timesheets. For the right company part of the fee can be equity.

  • Fractional CTO

    The whole technical side is off your plate: hiring, architecture, process, priorities.

    Up to 15 hours a week, from 3 months

  • CTO with a delivery team

    You have an idea and no developers. I own the architecture and the outcome; my engineers build it. You get a working product, not advice.

    Fixed scope, 50% upfront

  • Launch partner

    MVP architecture, process, first release, then a clean handover to the team you hire.

    6–12 weeks, one-off

  • AI and systems advisory

    Strategy sessions, architecture review, an AI roadmap your team can execute. No operations.

    Up to 5 hours a week

  • Got a SaaS idea and no CTO? Let’s talk.

Where this comes from

Viacheslav Nikolaev

Fifteen-plus years in infrastructure, from Linux sysadmin to Head of Infrastructure, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I’ve built a department from one engineer to two teams, and watched it keep working after I left.

In the last year four founders got a finished result from the same model: I take the architecture and the client, a small delivery team and AI tooling do the building. A logistics platform, a marketplace MVP, an infrastructure migration, an online store.

I work in English and Russian. When a project pulls me in, I stay close afterwards as an advisor.

Career

  • 2026– Fractional CTO, independent
  • 2025–26 DevOps team lead, Fundraise Up
  • 2020–25 Head of DevOps, then Head of Infrastructure, Uplatform
  • 2018–21 CTO, part-time, Alloka
  • 2013–19 Linux sysadmin to Head of DevOps, Oggetto
  • 2010–13 Developer and Linux sysadmin, SAIFAS

Building a product without a CTO? Let’s talk.

Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. Tell me where the product is stuck and I’ll tell you what I would do first — whether or not we work together.

You’ll talk to me directly.

Book a 30-minute call

Rather write first? Message me on LinkedIn.