How many hours a week is a fractional CTO?

Usually two to six hours a week, depending on stage: a standing call, async review, and a monthly summary. It flexes up for a hiring round or a fundraise and down when things are steady.

What does a fractional CTO cost in Hong Kong?

Less than one full-time senior engineer. Advisory work is priced as a monthly retainer against the hours above and quoted after a first call. Scoped projects such as a due-diligence report are fixed fee.

I review code every week and will prototype to settle an argument, but a retainer is not an engineering seat. If you need an engineer, I help you hire one and then hold the bar.

Can you work with our existing agency or offshore team?

Yes. Much of the value is having one person on your side of the table who reads their estimates, reviews their pull requests, and tells you when to push back.

Fractional CTO & CIO in Hong Kong

A fractional CTO gives a founder the judgement of an experienced technical executive for a few hours a week instead of a full-time salary and an equity grant. I work with Hong Kong and remote-first startups from pre-seed to Series A, in English, on Hong Kong time.

When it fits

A non-technical founder is making architecture, hiring, or vendor decisions alone.
The team ships, but releases are slow, incidents repeat, or the cloud bill keeps climbing.
An investor or enterprise customer wants to see a technical owner before signing.
A first engineering hire or an agency handover needs someone to hold the standard.

What the retainer covers

A standing weekly call with the founder and, when useful, the engineers.
Technology roadmap and architecture decisions written down, with the trade-offs.
Hiring support: role scopes, interview loops, take-home reviews, offer calibration.
Vendor, agency, and build-versus-buy decisions with a recommendation, not a menu.
Review of pull requests, designs, and incident write-ups during the week, async.
A monthly written summary you can forward to your board or investors.

Fractional CIO

Smaller companies rarely need a CTO and a CIO. When the questions are internal systems, SaaS sprawl, identity and access, device security, data protection, or audit readiness rather than product engineering, the same retainer runs as a fractional CIO engagement.

Typical deliverables are a systems map, a consolidation plan with costs, an access and offboarding process, and a security baseline that an enterprise customer's questionnaire will accept.

How it runs

Calls are early morning or evening Hong Kong time, which is daytime in Europe and the Gulf, so founders in those regions get live hours as well. Everything else runs async in your tools: Slack, GitHub, Notion, Linear, or whatever the team already uses.

The first month starts with a short review of the codebase, infrastructure, delivery practice, and the roadmap. You get a written picture of where the risks are and a 90-day plan. From there the retainer runs month to month; there is no minimum term.

I do not take full-time or interim roles, and I do not run your engineering team day to day. The retainer is judgement, direction, and accountability, so that the people who do run it ship better.

What I bring

I have founded and built LX Software's own products: Evolve Sprouts, Siu Tin Dei, and ai-cxo, an AI executive board that runs parts of the company. The stack is AWS, TypeScript, React, Python, and LLM tooling, with infrastructure as code and CI/CD from the first commit. The advice is grounded in running production systems, not in slides.