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When do you need an interim CTO?
- Your CTO or technical co-founder has left, by choice or not, and the team is still working.
- The CTO is on long leave and nobody else can make technical decisions.
- You are hiring a CTO and the search will take months, while the roadmap and the team cannot wait.
- A vendor or freelancer ran your technology and you are taking it in-house.
In each case the risks are the same: access and knowledge sit with one person who is no longer there, decisions pile up, releases slow down, and good developers start to leave. An interim CTO stops that within weeks.
What the interim CTO does
Week 1: secure the situation
- Lists every repository, server, cloud account, domain, app store account, third-party service and credential.
- Moves ownership to company-controlled accounts and rotates secrets the previous CTO held.
- Talks to every developer and vendor: what is in progress, what is blocked, what only one person knows.
Months 1-2: stabilise
- Re-establishes a release rhythm, code review and incident handling.
- Writes down the architecture and the decisions that existed only in the previous CTO's head.
- Makes the pending decisions that cannot wait: hires, vendor renewals, infrastructure, security fixes.
- If needed, starts with a two-week technical audit to know exactly what was inherited.
Months 2 onwards: hire and hand over
- Defines what kind of CTO the company actually needs next: hands-on lead, engineering manager or architect.
- Writes the technical part of the job description, screens candidates and runs the technical interviews.
- Onboards the new CTO with a written handover: architecture, risks, roadmap, team, vendors.
Plans and prices
| Plan | Fits | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Interim CTO 1 day a week | A stable product, a team with a senior developer who runs day to day | $2,500 / month |
| Interim CTO 2 days a week | Active development, several developers, open incidents or a migration | $4,500 / month |
| Technical audit | A full picture of what was inherited, in 2 weeks | $3,500 fixed |
Month to month, billed separately from any development. Anton takes at most two fractional or interim clients at a time. More about how he works as a part-time CTO on the main fractional CTO page.
Independent of hiring and development
The interim CTO does not compete for the permanent role and does not need to sell you development. If your team needs extra developers while you hire, our dedicated development team is one option among others, and Anton tells you in writing when he recommends it so you can compare it with other vendors.
Who is the interim CTO?
Anton Lytvynov has worked in software since 2011. As team lead at Anycommerce he built two payment products from zero, integrated them with the Natixis banking system and managed fully remote teams; at Meetic he worked on payment integrations for more than 30 Match Group sites. He founded Lytvynov Production, where he leads the architecture of the products we build, and holds master's degrees in artificial intelligence and applied mathematics. He works in English, French, Ukrainian and Russian.
