Fractional AI Architect
You are about to hire for a problem you cannot specify yet.
Ongoing architecture, evaluation, and stack decisions with your CTO — at eight, twelve, or twenty hours a week.
3 months minimum · $9-15K/mo · Signed off by CTO or VP Engineering
6+
Platforms taken from prototype to production
71% to 96%
SLO compliance improvement across three client platforms
~40%
Release-cycle overhead reduction across four distributed teams
Who this is for
- You are shipping AI features and the architectural decisions are being made by whoever is closest to the ticket.
- You have an open req for a senior AI platform hire and no confident spec for it.
- You want someone accountable for the technical direction without adding permanent headcount.
And who it is not
- You need an implementer. This is architecture, review, and decisions — hands stay on the keyboard for prototypes and spikes, not for delivering your roadmap.
- You want a name for a deck or a diligence round. This is hands-on direction, and it earns its place in the architecture reviews, not on a slide.
What you get
- Architecture ownership: the decisions get made, written down, and defended.
- Evaluation and SLO frameworks that give your team a shared definition of working.
- Stack and vendor selection with the trade-offs written out, not asserted.
- Code and design review on the parts that matter, at the depth the repos on this site should suggest.
- Hiring specification: what to hire for, in what order, and what to stop paying for.
How it runs
Month 1
Read and rank
The whole system read in one pass, decisions inventoried, and the top three architectural risks named and ranked.
Month 2
Standards
Evaluation harness, SLOs, cost controls, and review standards in place, so quality stops being a matter of opinion.
Month 3+
Cadence
Weekly working sessions, design review, and whatever the roadmap turns out to need. Renewed monthly, cancellable with notice.
This has shipped
What it costs
$9-15K/mo
Three tiers: 8, 12, or 20 hours per week. Three-month minimum, because anything shorter is a project, not a retainer.
Every engagement can start as a $2,500 paid pilot, credited in full against the full scope if you go ahead.
Every engagement and what it costsBefore you talk to anyone
Agent SLO & Error Budget Calculator
Turn reliability targets into error budgets, alert thresholds, and a number your team can argue about before the incident. Free, runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves it.
Open the agent slo & error budget calculatorQuestions people actually ask
Why a three-month minimum?
Because the first month is spent reading the system. A one-month retainer buys you the diagnosis and none of the value.
Should we just hire someone full time?
Probably, eventually. The market median for an AI governance or platform hire runs around $169K plus equity and three to six months of search. Three months of fractional costs less than the search and tells you exactly what to write in the req.
How much do you actually write code?
Enough to stay honest — prototypes, spikes, and the occasional hard piece. Not enough to become a dependency. If your roadmap needs an implementer, that is a project engagement.
What happens if it is not working?
Cancel with 30 days' notice. There is no lock-in and no termination fee. A retainer that has to be enforced by contract is already over.
Fifteen minutes is enough to work out whether this is the right engagement, or whether it is one of the others, or none of them.
Book a 15-min callScoping by email works too — send what you're building and the read-back comes with a recommendation on where to start — even when the right start is smaller than you expected.
The SLO starter pack: the four objective definitions, the error budget policy template, and the alerting thresholds behind the 71% to 96% programme.