Fractional CTO for Defence & Aerospace

The first job is usually hiring. Getting your first two engineers right matters more than any architecture decision, because they will make most of the subsequent ones.

In defence & aerospace, systems must run fully air-gapped, on open weights, with no external dependency whatsoever. That single fact reshapes how fractional cto has to be built here, the guardrails, the approval points and the evidence trail are design inputs rather than things bolted on before go-live.

The workload we are most often asked to take on first is logistics and inventory optimisation, usually integrated against simulation platforms. We start from the constraint, not the capability, what the system must never do, who signs off, and what happens when it is wrong.

Built by engineers who ship production systems, not by a practice that subcontracts the build. Six weeks to something running in production, not six quarters to a strategy document.