Standing up the technology function for a greenfield startup with aggressive growth targets

Business context

A newly funded startup with ambitious first-year revenue targets and a tight runway. The founders had strong commercial instincts but no technology team, no infrastructure, and no delivery process. They needed to move from zero to a functioning product and engineering operation quickly — without burning through their runway on over-engineered solutions or expensive vendor lock-in.

The challenge

Everything needed to be built from scratch: architecture, team, process, vendor relationships. But this wasn’t a “move fast and break things” situation — the founders needed a technology foundation that could support aggressive near-term growth without requiring a costly re-platform at the point where the business started to scale. The tension was between speed of execution and durability of decisions.

My role

Interim CTO — accountable for all technology decisions, team hiring, vendor selection, delivery cadence, and cost control. I reported directly to the founders and participated in board discussions on technology strategy and capability planning.

What I did

Designed the platform architecture with scale in mind — not over-engineering for day one, but ensuring the foundations wouldn’t need ripping out when the business reached 10x its initial targets. The key design principle was avoiding premature complexity: a small team executing against a clean, well-understood architecture is faster and cheaper than a large team managing an over-engineered one.

Hired the initial engineering team and established the delivery practices, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and incident response processes that would let a small team move quickly without accumulating catastrophic technical debt. Deliberate choices were made at every stage to keep the stack conventional and well-supported — maximising the hiring pool and minimising onboarding time.

Ran vendor selection with a focus on capability per dollar — evaluating options on total cost of ownership rather than feature lists, and negotiating terms that gave the business flexibility as it grew. Where off-the-shelf services could replace custom builds, we took them. Where custom builds were unavoidable, we kept them simple.

Built a capability roadmap that gave the founders visibility on when to hire a permanent CTO versus extending the interim arrangement, and what the team shape needed to look like at each revenue milestone. Transitioning cleanly was part of the brief from day one.

Systems and platforms

AWS (ECS, RDS, CloudFront), Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, Terraform for infrastructure as code, Datadog for observability. Deliberately kept the stack conventional and well-supported to maximise the hiring pool and minimise onboarding time for each new team member.

Outcomes

The engineering team was operational and shipping production features within six weeks of formation. Architecture was designed to support the business through its next growth phase without requiring re-platforming. Vendor costs were managed tightly against budget constraints — the total technology spend came in well under the board-approved envelope. The capability roadmap gave the founders a clear framework for their permanent CTO hire, which they executed successfully after the engagement concluded.