Fractional CTO & Builder. I embed with your team to ship what matters, or I build your MVP hands-on. AI, SaaS, agentic systems.
Chris Schulze. Builder, CTO, founder.
Available worldwide & in-person
Sound familiar?
Your engineers are busy but the product isn't moving. Releases slip, technical debt piles up, and nobody can explain to the board why things take so long. Hiring more people hasn't changed it.
The CTO-shaped hole in your org is costing you more every month you don't fill it: runway, speed, and deals your sales team can't close because the product isn't ready.
You need clarity on where you stand and what to fix first.
I start with a deep dive into your tech, product, and commercial alignment. You get a clear report: what's working, what's broken, and what to fix first. 3 to 5 days, one deliverable.
Your team ships, but there's no senior technical leadership tying it together.
I embed part-time as your fractional CTO. I align engineering with product and commercial, fix delivery cadence, and grow engineering maturity. Your team starts owning outcomes instead of ticket throughput. I'm technical enough to review PRs, challenge architecture decisions, and build alongside your engineers when needed.
You need a product built. No team, no CTO, no time.
I take your AI product or SaaS MVP from architecture to production. I make the technical decisions and write the code. You get a working product in production, with the tradeoffs made explicit.
About
4x founder, one exit, 10+ years as CTO across European startups. BSc and MSc in Computer Science with a focus on AI and Machine Learning.
I'm still deeply technical. I read your codebase, evaluate your architecture, and have real conversations with your engineers. I also build: MVPs, AI agents, SaaS products. I make the decisions and write the code.
Product, commercial, engineering. These can't operate in silos. I connect them.
Based in Frankfurt. Working with startups and scale-ups worldwide.
Background
Digital Office 24 GmbH · SaaS / Fintech
2markdown · Developer Tools · Built & sold
Aivy · AI / Recommendations
feelyt · AI / Data Science
Theoretical CS & Machine Learning
Selected Projects
Inherited platform, no senior technical leadership in place, production issues surfacing through customers. In 5 days I assessed the codebase, infrastructure, team process, and delivery risk. Over 11 weeks I helped stabilize production, reduce key-person risk, introduce observability, and turn a vague inherited roadmap into an execution plan the team could own.
Built a scalable multi-tenant SaaS platform including banking for personal and corporate finance. Led tech, security, IT, AI, and product.
Built a service that enabled GenAI to read any website by making content machine-readable. Got copied by a YC startup. Still made a small exit.
Recommendations
When Christian came in, we had just acquired a platform our team didn't build, with no senior technical leadership in place and incidents surfacing through customer complaints. Within 11 weeks he assessed the technology, defined a roadmap, and executed it. He stabilized production, reduced key-person risk, and built the clarity the team needed to operate on the codebase independently.
Christian helped Product and Engineering make the tough one-way-door decisions on a newly acquired product platform. Within weeks he sorted through the noise, created an in-depth audit of our platform and process, and built a concrete roadmap aligned with high-level goals.
Christian was our CTO and co-founder. He built scalable technical systems and developed our engineering team with equal attention to both. Pragmatic in approach, clear in communication, focused on quality.
Next step