Fixed-scope review of code, infra, data, and team. Rewrite-or-refactor call with evidence. Roadmap your board can read. From $5,499/mo.
- Audit
- Architect
- Scale
monthly retainer
Who this is for
You raised your seed round 6 to 12 months ago. Engineering velocity has quietly softened, but no one on the team can say exactly why. The board is asking about scale readiness. Your lead engineer says 'refactor'; a contractor you spoke to says 'rewrite.' I do post-seed architecture audits as a fixed-scope first engagement — two weeks, five layers, one defensible recommendation.
The pain today
- Sprint velocity is falling but the team blames different things each week
- MVP-era shortcuts are now load-bearing — nobody knows which ones are safe to touch
- Board or investors asking about scale readiness with no concrete answer ready
- Team is split between refactor and rewrite, paralyzed waiting for someone decisive
- Adding engineers hasn't improved throughput — it may have made it worse
The outcome you get
- Executive brief your board and lead investor can read in 10 minutes
- P0-P3 prioritized fix list with business-impact scoring for each item
- Clear rewrite-or-refactor recommendation, backed by evidence from the audit
- 6-month technical roadmap tied to your growth milestones
- Team ownership plan — what your senior engineers should own versus what to hire for
What the 2-week audit covers
I examine five layers, each scored 1 to 5 with supporting evidence. No layer gets a pass on opinion alone.
Code: coupling, test coverage, abstraction quality, and documentation. I read 3 to 5 critical modules in depth rather than skimming every file. The goal is understanding where changes are risky, not cataloguing every function.
Infrastructure: deployment pipeline, monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident history. I want to see what happens when something breaks at 2 a.m., not what the runbook says should happen.
Data: schema health, query performance, data integrity patterns, and backup and recovery. Post-seed, this layer is almost always where the first production scare lives.
Team: size, seniority distribution, PR and code review practices, and onboarding friction. Slow engineering is often a team-structure problem dressed up as a technical one.
Velocity: deployment frequency, story throughput over time, and mean time to recovery from incidents. Numbers reveal patterns that interviews obscure.
Executive brief your board and lead investor can read in 10 minutes
How I prioritize findings
Every finding gets a P0-P3 label with a short rationale.
P0 means a production stability or security issue that needs attention immediately. The bar is deliberately high — I do not call something P0 to create urgency. P1 is significant drag on velocity or scale readiness, targeted within one quarter. P2 is moderate compounding debt, addressed within two quarters. P3 is tracked but not urgent.
Each item includes: a plain-language description, the business impact if ignored, an effort estimate, any dependencies on other fixes, and a suggested owner. The intent is a list you can bring into your next planning cycle and act on without me in the room.
Founders can reprioritize against business context. If a P1 infra fix would land during a launch sprint, push it. The list is an input to your judgment, not a mandate.
3s → 300ms: API response time.
The deliverables
Two written outputs, both delivered by end of week two.
Executive brief (5 to 10 pages): overall architecture state, top findings in plain language, the rewrite-or-refactor recommendation, and the 6-month roadmap. Written for the founder, board, and lead investor. No jargon. A board member with no technical background should understand the risk picture after reading it.
Engineering roadmap (15 to 30 pages): detailed findings per layer with evidence, the full P0-P3 list, technical context for each fix, and suggested approaches. Written for the engineering team to execute against.
I close week two with a presentation session — founder plus senior engineering lead. We walk through the findings together, I answer questions, and we agree on which items to move into the first month. That session usually surfaces the two or three things the team already suspected but needed external validation to act on.
The rewrite-or-refactor call
This is the question most post-seed founders are actually trying to answer when they ask for an audit.
I weigh: codebase age and original design intent, test coverage and how safely changes can be made, the team's relationship with the code, architectural fit for the next 18 months of growth, business pressure and what a feature freeze would cost, and technology freshness relative to hiring markets.
Refactor is right when the foundations are sound but specific hot spots need repair, when business pressure cannot absorb six months of no new features, or when the team's accumulated knowledge about the system would be lost in a rewrite. In most post-seed audits, targeted refactoring is the answer.
Rewrite is right when the architecture is structurally incapable of supporting where the business needs to go, when test coverage is too low to make incremental change safely, or when the current stack genuinely blocks hiring at the speed the company requires.
I give a decisive recommendation with evidence, not a diplomatic 'it depends.' The Cuez engagement started this way: the audit identified specific query patterns and missing caching layers driving a 3-second API, not a general 'the code is messy' observation. The targeted fix dropped response time to 300ms — 10x faster — and cut infrastructure cost roughly 40%.
Preparing your team
Engineers sometimes feel an audit is a performance review. I position it differently from the start.
Before week one I send a short prep document: what access I need, what the interview format looks like, and what I am not doing. Engineers get to see questions before we talk. Interviews are structured conversations, not interrogations. Most engineers know exactly where the problems are. My job is to organize that knowledge into something actionable and give the team permission to address it.
Access I typically need: read access to the main repository, infrastructure dashboard or a summary export, a recent incident log, deployment history for the past three months, and one hour with each of two to four senior engineers. That is the full list. No production access, no credentials.
After the audit
The audit is a fixed-scope deliverable. Many founders take the findings and execute with their internal team, which is completely fine. The audit was the deliverable.
Some continue into a monthly retainer for implementation oversight. The Fractional CTO advisory tier starts at $5,499 per month. The full engagement tier is $9,499 per month for deeper involvement in hiring, architecture decisions, and team leadership. The audit findings typically make it clear which, if either, makes sense.
The 14-day money-back guarantee applies to the audit engagement. If the findings do not justify their cost, you do not pay. Work Made for Hire on all written deliverables — executive brief and roadmap are yours on delivery. If Imohub is any reference: the audit there recommended a full rebuild with clear evidence, and the team executed it. Post-rebuild query response landed under 0.5 seconds against 120,000-plus property records, with infrastructure cost down 70%.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rescued a slow API that was blocking user growth
Cuez is a live broadcast production tool used by TV teams on air across Europe. I inherited a backend API averaging 3 seconds per response and cut it to 300ms, while reducing infrastructure costs by 40% and leaving the system stable under real production load.
Read the case studyKeep reading
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
A review of five layers: code, infrastructure, data, team, and velocity. Each layer is scored 1 to 5 with evidence. Deliverables are an executive brief (5 to 10 pages) written for the board and a detailed engineering roadmap (15 to 30 pages) for the team. The audit closes with a presentation session where we agree on the first month of priorities. Fixed scope, two weeks.
Technical due diligence is written for an investor making a binary decision. An architecture audit is written for the founding team making an operating decision. The framing, audience, and output are different. I write for both — the executive brief satisfies investor-level questions, and the engineering roadmap gives the team something executable. Same audit, two audiences.
That is usually the point. I weigh test coverage, architectural fit, team knowledge, business velocity pressure, and stack freshness, then give a decisive recommendation with the evidence behind it. Most post-seed codebases need targeted refactoring, not a full rewrite. When a rewrite is warranted, I say so and explain the case in language defensible to your board.
Common, and addressable. I send a prep document before week one explaining what I am reviewing, what the interview format looks like, and what I am not doing — no gotcha questions, no performance judgment. Most engineers welcome the clarity. They usually know where the problems are. The audit gives them external validation to surface what they already see.
Minimal disruption. I need one hour from each of two to four senior engineers, spread across two weeks. Repository and infrastructure access is read-only. I do not sit in standups or planning sessions unless specifically invited. The full context I require can be gathered asynchronously, with interviews scheduled around the team's calendar.
No. The audit is a standalone fixed-scope engagement. You take the deliverables and execute with your internal team if that is the right call. Some founders continue on the monthly advisory retainer for oversight during implementation. The audit findings usually make it clear whether ongoing engagement adds value — I do not push for it either way.
The 14-day money-back guarantee exists precisely for this. If the findings do not justify their cost, you do not pay. Beyond that: the audit scoring is evidence-based, each P0-P3 call has a written rationale, and the deliverables are yours under Work Made for Hire. If the codebase is in reasonable shape, I say so. Inflating findings would be bad for both of us.