CTO-level judgment. Without the equity.
You built the product. The AI wrote the code. Now you need someone to make the hard technical calls — stack choices, security, scaling, hiring — without giving away equity or waiting six months to recruit.
Vibe CTO is a fractional CTO engagement backed by the Formulate AI team — connected to your codebase, your stack, and your roadmap from day one.
Opinionated answers on stack choices, infra decisions, and trade-offs — before you build, not after.
Weekly scan of your codebase. Prioritised list of what to fix, what to ignore, and what will break you at scale.
Async reviews on your pull requests. Security, performance, and maintainability — every time, not just when you remember to ask.
OWASP audit, dependency review, data handling checks. Know your exposure before a customer asks.
Regular deployment reviews — we check your release process, flag bottlenecks, and give you a clear picture of what needs attention before it becomes an incident.
Writes job descriptions, screens candidates technically, and helps you avoid the wrong first engineering hire.
Engineers who've been in the room.
Combined 150+ years · All vetted · Identities protected
Ex-Meta · Ex-Stripe
Ads at 2B+ users
“Rewrote the ads auction engine under live traffic. $800M ARR running on code shipped in 14 days.”
Ex-LinkedIn · Ex-Microsoft
Search at 900M members
“Took search P99 from 8s to 280ms. The infra team said it would take two quarters. We did it in six weeks.”
Ex-Intuit · Ex-AWS
50M+ user data at rest
“Led the GDPR overhaul for 50M users. Zero fines. Shipped in 5 months with a team of four.”
Ex-Netflix · Ex-YouTube
250M+ concurrent streams
“Cut CDN costs by $3.2M/year with one config change. It had been there, unquestioned, for five years.”
Ex-Google SRE · Ex-Uber
99.999% uptime at global scale
“Rebuilt the on-call rotation from 40 pages/week to 2. Team attrition dropped to zero the next quarter.”
Ex-Amazon · Ex-Twilio
300+ enterprise integrations
“Designed the API contract that 300 enterprise customers built against. Zero breaking changes in 4 years.”
Ex-Twitter · Ex-Databricks
50M events/hour, sub-100ms
“Built the real-time ML feature store from scratch. 50M events/hour, sub-100ms lookups, on week six.”
Ex-Shopify · Ex-Salesforce
Peak $5B GMV throughput
“Seen the same database bottleneck kill four startups. Now I find it before it kills yours.”
Ex-Coinbase · Ex-Robinhood
Regulatory audits at $50B AUM
“Designed the audit trail that passed 3 consecutive SOC 2 reviews without a single finding.”
Ex-Atlassian · Ex-GitHub
200k+ developer users
“The developer platform I shipped is used by 200k engineers. The docs PR took longer than the feature.”
Scroll to see all 10 profiles →
For solo founders and early-stage teams who need a technical sounding board.
- Up to 5 async architecture questions / week
- Monthly 1:1 strategy call (60 min)
- Stack & vendor recommendations
- Pre-launch readiness checklist
- Response within 24 hours
For teams actively shipping — ongoing technical oversight without a full-time hire.
- Everything in Advisor
- Weekly sprint & PR reviews
- Codebase audit (monthly)
- Security & dependency review
- Hiring support & technical screening
- Response within 4 hours
For Series A teams or orgs that need CTO-level bandwidth as a dedicated resource.
- Everything in Partner
- Dedicated Slack channel
- Roadmap co-ownership
- Engineering team mentorship
- Board & investor technical prep
- SLA-backed response time
All plans are monthly, cancel anytime. Custom billing available for annual engagements.