Yury Sukhoverkhov

Fractional CTO

You probably don't need a full-time CTO yet. You need the decisions one would make.

People hire me in these situations:

Your team outgrew its structure. When your team grows from 5 to 25, what used to work because everyone was in one conversation doesn't anymore. You need someone who's taken a team through that transition before and knows how to set up engineering processes and architectural principles.

A founding engineer is being promoted to CTO. This is a significant step and a career change. It comes with a shift in required experience and activities. For six months I do the unfamiliar parts of it with them rather than for them, acting as a hands-on coach and a safety net.

Your CTO just left. The search takes four to six months if you're lucky, and decisions don't wait that long. Letting the ship drift during that time without a captain is asking for disaster. I hold the role so that whoever you hire inherits a motivated team and a well-maintained, coherent solution.

There is a skill gap in software architecture that leads to a visible decay in delivery speed or solution stability, and no AI coding agents help. I'll join your team and upskill your engineers. I do it mostly by solving problems together with them while explaining my principles and ways of working.

What I'll do

• Own the technical decisions, and make sure that reasoning is persisted for people who will follow.
• Be the technical voice to your board, your investors and your biggest customer.
• Fix the structure: who owns which part of the system, who decides what without a meeting, and which of your problems is org design rather than architecture.
• Effective use of AI coding agents. They generate working code faster than any team can build an understanding of it - that's epistemic debt, and it compounds quietly until the day nobody can safely change anything. We'll use these beasts but will keep that gap closed.
• Get my hands dirty with coding and incident response - because it's the fastest way to learn your system and because it's how I find out what's actually true rather than what I'm told in a status meeting.

What stays after I leave

• I will find or grow your permanent CTO.
• Decisions that a new person can reconstruct without me in the room.
• An engineering department structure that fits the size you are now.

Cases

• Grew a "Fishing Paradise 3D" game to 60M users, scaling the infrastructure and the engineering team.
• Built the platform and the team that Ditto Care raised its €7.6M round on.

Book a 30-minute meeting to discuss your situation and find out whether you need me as a fractional CTO or another kind of engagement will work better.

Software Architecture Audit

Most architecture problems aren't architecture problems. Find out which kind you have before you spend the budget.

You know something is slowing you down. Releases that used to take days take weeks. Every estimate comes back bigger than the last. Engineers say "we need to refactor", the business hears "we need to stop shipping", and nobody is quite sure who's right.

What I'll do

• Talk to your engineers - one-on-one, without their manager in the room.
• Talk to the business side about what they think they asked for.
• Read the solution as it actually is, not as the diagram says it is.
• Look at how technical decisions get made, not only what was decided.

What you get

• A written diagnosis, ranked by what each problem is costing you.
• A "fix now" list - with the reasoning visible so your team can argue with it.
• A "leave it alone" list. Most of the value shows up here.
• A 90-minute walkthrough, business and engineering in the same room, where I explain the cost of not fixing each problem.

Book a 30-minute meeting to find out whether your problem is architectural at all.

Training

Software architecture is simpler than it seems, and more useful for day-to-day engineering than it feels.

With the rise of AI coding agents, I truly believe every software engineer must become a software architect to use these powerful tools well - they amplify teams. An under-qualified team will slip into disaster much faster.

I'll walk you through the architecture principles that help you build solutions that last for decades - faster. This is equally useful for engineers of all levels: architecture skills aren't built on top of engineering skills, they're a parallel track.

After the training you will:

• Manage complexity and technical debt well enough to keep shipping fast for years.
• Make high-quality decisions faster - and leave behind reasoning your team can still follow a year later.
• Design for uncertainty: the business will change its mind, and the architecture should expect it.
• Understand the fundamentals that make both human engineers and AI coding agents more effective.

Book a 30-minute meeting to discuss your education needs.

Mentoring

A captain has the right to be wrong, but not the right to hesitate.

And yet tech leaders often have to decide without enough information, and those decisions have long-lasting consequences. Hesitation, doubt and double-checking are natural. During the mentoring sessions you will make high-quality decisions, in a space where it's safe to hesitate. My job will be to broaden your solution space, show you your cases from angles you are not seeing. I bring my expertise to make use of, but the goal is to support you to generate high standard solutions of your own.

What we'll work on

• How to design an architecture that survives the business changing its mind.
• How to align technology and business, so that the two are transparent to each other.
• How to build and manage an engineering department.
• Anything else you need a second opinion on.

A weekly one-hour check-in, plus ad-hoc calls for urgent cases.

Book a 30-minute meeting to find out more.