Your Startup Needs a CTO.
Not Necessarily a Full-Time One.
Strategic engineering leadership, technical hiring, architecture oversight, and board-level credibility — without the $300K salary before product-market fit. Subeesh brings 26 years of delivery engineering from Nokia, Stryker, and Vocera to your team, on a structure that makes sense for where you are right now.
Subeesh Sivanandan
Founder & CEO, Stonetusker Systems
- 🏢 Nokia · Stryker/Vocera · VeriSign — 26 years delivery engineering
- 🏥 Fractional CIO, Healioscan — AI cancer detection platform
- 🎓 BITS Pilani MS + ISB CTO Programme 2024
- ☁️ AWS SA · Azure Admin · RHCE — certified 2025
- 👥 Led 300+ engineers across India and US
Three stages where this
makes the most sense.
CTO-as-a-Service is not for everyone — and I'll tell you upfront if it's not the right fit for where you are.
Funded startup — no technical co-founder
You've raised seed or Series A. Your product is gaining traction. But every technical decision — hiring, architecture, vendor choices, security — is landing on someone who wasn't hired to make them. A full-time CTO hire takes 6 months and $300K you'd rather spend on product. This is the problem fractional CTO solves.
Technical founder hitting a scaling wall
You built the product. You know the code. But the team is growing and you're spending more time managing people and firefighting — and less time building. You need someone who's been through the 100-to-300-engineer transition and can help you structure the engineering org before it gets messy.
Scale-up preparing for Series B or enterprise sales
Your enterprise prospects are asking about security posture, compliance certifications, and engineering maturity. Your board wants a technical perspective in the room. You need a CTO-level voice who can articulate your architecture credibly and help you close the gaps before due diligence starts.
This is what a real
CTO engagement looks like.
Not advisory hours. Not a monthly call and a Slack handle. Active, accountable leadership across the things that matter most at your stage.
Engineering Strategy and Roadmap
Translating your product and business goals into a concrete engineering roadmap — what to build, in what order, with what team structure. Includes identifying technical debt that will slow you down before it shows up as a production incident.
Architecture Decisions and Technical Oversight
Making the calls your team needs someone senior to own — cloud architecture, data layer design, API strategy, security foundations, and vendor selection. Decisions documented with the reasoning behind them so future hires understand the context.
Technical Hiring and Team Building
Writing job specs that attract the right people, running or reviewing technical interviews, and helping you structure an engineering team that scales — not one that needs to be rebuilt at Series B. Includes building the culture and process foundations from the start.
Delivery Process and CI/CD Foundation
Setting up the delivery pipeline your engineering team will rely on for years — CI/CD, release process, code review standards, deployment guardrails. Gets the 90-day DevOps transformation approach applied at the foundational level, before bad habits form.
Investor and Board Representation
Technical credibility in board meetings, investor updates, and due diligence conversations. I can present engineering progress, explain architecture decisions, and field technical questions from investors who know what to look for. Particularly valuable in Series A/B conversations.
Compliance and Security Posture
Getting your SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR foundations in place without turning it into a 12-month internal project. Built on real experience from regulated environments — Healioscan (AI healthcare), Stryker (medical devices), and 26 years in enterprise delivery.
What this is —
and what it isn't.
Most fractional CTO services are advisory. This one is operational. Here's the difference.
What you can expect
- ✓ Someone who has actually run engineering teams — not just consulted on them
- ✓ Hands-on involvement in hiring, architecture, delivery process, and vendor decisions
- ✓ Regular presence — weekly calls, Slack access, available when decisions need to be made
- ✓ A plan to find and onboard your permanent CTO if that's the goal
- ✓ Transparent about what's outside my depth and who you should talk to instead
- ✓ NDA from day one — your architecture and team structure stay confidential
What this isn't
- ✕ A monthly strategy deck with no follow-through
- ✕ Advisory-only with no accountability for outcomes
- ✕ A vendor manager who just coordinates between contractors
- ✕ A replacement for a full-time CTO when you've reached the stage that needs one
- ✕ A generic framework applied without understanding your specific context
From first call to
active engagement — four steps.
Discovery Call
30 minutes. I ask about your current engineering setup, goals, biggest technical risk, and where the gaps are. No pitch deck on my side — I come prepared with questions, not slides.
Diagnostic Week
After the call, if there's a fit, I spend the first week doing a structured review of your stack, team, and delivery process. NDA signed before this. You get a written findings summary before you commit to anything.
Scoped Engagement
We agree on scope, rhythm, and deliverables for the first 90 days — what I'm accountable for, how often we connect, how decisions get made. Milestone-based billing. You pay for agreed outcomes, not time.
Ongoing or Transition
After 90 days, we review and decide together — extend, reduce scope, or transition to a permanent CTO hire I've helped you find and onboard. Every engagement builds capability, not dependency.
26 years is a long time.
Here's what actually matters.
I started in build engineering in 1999 at VeriSign and CMC Limited. I spent seven years at Nokia running release teams through the Symbian era — 15 engineers, complex multi-platform builds, global product timelines. Then six years at IP Infusion heading DevOps for open networking products. Then five years at Vocera, a Stryker company, where I built and ran the release engineering function for a globally distributed team of 300+ engineers across India and the US.
The thing all of that taught me: delivery problems are almost always architecture and coordination problems in disguise. Teams grow, processes don't scale with them, and suddenly nobody can ship confidently. That pattern shows up in startups and enterprises alike.
Right now, alongside Stonetusker, I serve as fractional CIO at Healioscan — an AI-based cancer detection startup — where I'm building the engineering foundation for a product operating under FDA constraints. That keeps me accountable to exactly the problems founders face: move fast, stay compliant, don't break things that matter.
Talk to Subeesh Directly →Background at a glance
Three ways to work
together.
Every engagement is scoped individually — these are starting-point structures, not fixed packages. The right structure depends on your stage and what you already have in place.
- Weekly strategic call with founder or VP Eng
- Architecture and technology decisions review
- Async availability for urgent questions
- Quarterly engineering health assessment
- Investor and board prep support
- Hands-on engineering strategy and roadmap ownership
- Technical hiring — job specs, interviews, decisions
- Architecture ownership and documentation
- CI/CD and delivery process setup
- Compliance foundations (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR)
- Board and investor representation
- Weekly team touchpoints
- Everything in Fractional CTO, expanded scope
- Full engineering team leadership and accountability
- Permanent CTO search support and handover plan
- Ideal for post-funding scaling sprints or CTO exits
- Time-boxed — typically 3 to 6 months
All engagements start with a free discovery call and a paid diagnostic week. Pricing confirmed after the diagnostic — not upfront.
Questions before
the first call.
We already have a VP Engineering. Is there still a role for a fractional CTO?
Often yes — especially if your VP Eng is operationally focused and you need someone at the CTO level for strategy, board representation, and architecture direction. The two roles are different. That said, if the overlap is too significant, I'll tell you that in the discovery call rather than take engagement that doesn't serve you.
How does this work if you're also running Stonetusker engagements at the same time?
I take a limited number of CTO-as-a-Service engagements at any one time — this is not a high-volume service. Before any engagement begins, I'm transparent about my current commitments and capacity. If there's a conflict of interest with an existing Stonetusker client, I'll tell you before the discovery call.
What if we want to hire a permanent CTO eventually? Does this compete with that?
No — and most fractional CTO engagements end with exactly that. Part of the engagement can include helping you define what you need in a permanent CTO, building the job spec, running the search process alongside a recruiter, and doing a structured handover. The goal is always to build your team's capability, not create dependency on me.
We're pre-revenue. Is this the right stage to engage a fractional CTO?
Honestly — it depends. If you're pre-revenue with a small team of two or three engineers, you probably need a senior engineering hire more than a fractional CTO. But if you're pre-revenue with investor backing, a growing team, and technical decisions that need an experienced hand, this could be exactly the right time. The discovery call is the right place to figure that out.
Engineering leadership on day one.
No six-month hiring wait.
30 minutes. I come prepared with questions about your team, your stack, and where the biggest risk is right now — not a pitch deck.
No retainers·NDA before any technical discussion·References available on request