Advise
Strategy · Due diligence
Board and investor-facing technology direction: what to build, buy, skip, or sequence. Technical due diligence for VCs and PE, and a senior sounding board when the big calls land on your desk.
Fractional CTO · AI-native · hands-on
The CTO who still ships.
Fractional CTO for seed to Series B founders and investors who need senior technology judgement now, not a £250k hire and a nine-month search. Twenty years leading engineering at LoyaltyLion, CloudMargin and Curve, landed directly into your business. AI-native, hands-on, and accountable for what goes live.
Now in the lab
Ship Kit: 113 launch-readiness checks for AI-built apps, plus a scanner that writes the fix-it spec for your coding agent. Free, open source.
See what it checksThree problems I get called for.
Each one is a real situation I've been brought in to fix. If one reads like your month, that's the conversation to have.
01
An empty CTO seat, and a roadmap that won't wait.
Your CTO just left, or the role has never existed, and a proper search takes six to nine months. Architecture decisions, delivery and vendor calls can't pause that long. I step in at full CTO level from the first week, keep the bar high, and hand over cleanly to your permanent hire, including helping you pick them.
02
One hard build that has to land.
A migration, a platform rebuild, or an AI initiative that has to be real rather than a slide. It has a clear beginning and end, and it needs someone senior to own it end to end for exactly that long, then step back.
03
Senior judgement, minus the full-time salary.
You already have a team. What's missing is the person who calls the architecture, keeps the roadmap honest, and tells you whether a vendor pitch is worth the money. A few focused days a month, not a permanent seat.
£4.5m → £14.5m
ARR scaled at LoyaltyLion
10,000+
merchants on the platform I scaled
2 → 20+
engineers, teams built from scratch
5×
CTO / Director of Engineering roles
A few of the teams I've led and built with
How I work
One senior operator, at the intensity your company needs. Turn it up to build, down to advise. It stays one person, accountable, all the way through.
Lead
Fractional CTO · embedded
Your CTO, embedded in the team: roadmap, hiring, delivery, architecture, security. I attend the standups, make the calls, and own the outcomes. Accountable for what ships, not for a report.
Build
Hands-on · AI-native
Hands-on where it counts: AI tools, agentic workflows, and automation, built to last and kept running. Most people hand you a prototype and vanish. I ship code, not slide decks, and I stay.
Teams also bring me in for one-off, hands-on AI workshops: a day spent getting people building with AI, not sitting through slides. Same call to set one up.
Case studies
01
JustPayMe
Founder, via ZildI lead the technology at Zild, the company behind JustPayMe: overdue invoices, chased from WhatsApp. Add a bill, start a chase, see who's paid, all from a chat, with AI reading each reply and picking the next nudge. In production, handling real payments.
Read the case studyResult
Chasing payments, from a chat.
02
Fractionals Match
Tech Equity PartnerBrought in to lead the technology after the original no-code build hit its ceiling: fast to demo, unable to scale or go live safely. Saving what works and rebuilding the rest on foundations that can actually grow, the same discipline behind 20 years of production software.
Read the case studyResult
A prototype that couldn't ship, to infrastructure that can.
03
Arc
Founder-builder · live on iOSStudios, agencies and builders lose arguments they already won, because project decisions live in scattered notes and email threads. I'm building Arc, the iOS app that listens to client meetings, pulls out every decision with the quote that settled it, and gets both sides to sign off. What was agreed becomes a fact, not a fight.
Read the case studyResult
Every decision made, agreed, and on the record.
From the lab: Lore.
Every team using AI coding agents lives the same decay: the agent slips, a human corrects it, and the lesson evaporates when the session ends. Lore closes that loop. It learns from the corrections your team is already making and turns them into reviewed, versioned policy that every AI tool you use reads, in every session.
The things only your senior devs know, in every AI session.
Lore is gated while I battle-test it on real repositories. Curious what it would learn from yours? Read the story behind Lore.
From the lab: Ship Kit.
AI-built apps ship fast and break in the same predictable ways: a database left publicly readable, a paywall that only exists in the browser, a .env reachable on the live domain, no analytics running on launch day. Ship Kit is the list of what to get right, 113 checks across 12 sections, built from a portfolio of real production launches. Read it as a field guide, or point the scanner at your repo and it writes a fix-it spec for your coding agent.
The list of what to get right, and a scanner that tells you where you stand.
Free and open source, no account, nothing uploaded. See what it checks, or clone it straight from github.com/edgewiselab/ship-kit .
Who you'll work with
Fractional CTO · AI transformation
I'm Filipe. Twenty years building and leading engineering teams, five times as CTO or Director of Engineering across fintech, e-commerce and legaltech. I've taken a platform from £4.5m to £14.5m ARR, modernised legacy systems for Tier 1 banks, built teams from two to twenty, and led SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Now I do that as a fractional CTO through Edgewise Lab: the same senior judgement and hands-on delivery, landed directly into your business, for exactly as long as you need it. AI-native by default. Brazilian-born, Cambridge-based.
Full career history and writing at filiperodriguez.com
Why me
Senior enough to lead. Hands-on enough to build.
Most technology help is one of two things: advisors who can't build, or builders who hand you something that breaks the moment they leave. I do both: step in as your CTO, then build the systems that make it real. Direct, senior, no layers between you and the person doing the work.
Most people with "Chief" in the title stopped writing code years ago. I still ship every week. When your stack breaks, you get me in the code, not a report about it.
How we start, and finish.
01
A 30-minute call. We see if it's a fit. No pitch.
02
A short diagnostic. I map what's real, what's risky, and a 30/60/90 plan.
03
Embedded at your intensity. Advise, lead, or build, dialled up or down as the work demands.
04
A designed handover. When the time comes, I hire and hand over to your permanent team.
I take on up to five fractional engagements at a time, so each one gets real senior attention.
Fractional, not part-time.
A full-time hire is slow and expensive. A consultant advises from the sidelines. I do neither: senior technology leadership that joins your business directly, builds the thing, and stays only as long as it's needed.
The best time to bring in senior technology leadership is before you think you need it.
The longer version, including what it costs and when it's the wrong answer: What a fractional CTO is, and isn't.
Tell me what's next.
Fifteen minutes, no pitch. If you need a fractional CTO, we'll figure out the shape together. If you need something built, we'll scope it. If it's not me, I'll say so and point you the right way.
You work with me directly. Not an agency, not a sales rep, not a junior.