"Should we hire a CTO?" is one of the first questions non-technical founders ask us, and one of the most expensive to get wrong. Hire too early and you pay a senior salary for someone who spends half the week waiting for the company to catch up. Hire too late and the first two years of technical decisions get made by whoever happened to be in the room.
A fractional CTO sits between those two. This post explains what the role covers, how the cost compares in the Greek market, and how to know when it's time to move to a full-time hire.
What a fractional CTO actually does
A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works for your company part of the week, on an ongoing basis. The job is the same as a full-time CTO's, scaled to the hours the company needs right now:
- Technical strategy. What to build, in what order, and what to leave out. A written roadmap the team and the board can read.
- Architecture decisions. Cloud provider, data model, monolith or services, build or buy. The decisions that are cheap to make well and very expensive to undo.
- Hiring. Writing roles that attract seniors, running technical interviews, and deciding which roles to hire first.
- Vendors and cost. Picking tools and contractors, and keeping the cloud bill in proportion to revenue.
- External credibility. Technical due diligence for investors, security questionnaires from enterprise customers, and the calls where someone needs to explain how the product scales.
What a fractional CTO usually isn't: a full-time engineer writing features every day. If you need more hands, that is a separate hire or a development partner. Some firms, including ours, offer both: a senior lead plus an engineering team behind them.
Fractional, interim, CTO as a service or full-time?
The labels overlap, so here is how we use them:
- Fractional CTO: part-time, ongoing, usually for months or years. You get one consistent person.
- Interim CTO: full-time, for a fixed period. Common when a CTO leaves suddenly or during an acquisition.
- CTO as a service: often used for a firm that provides a lead plus a team, sometimes interchangeable with fractional.
- Full-time CTO: an employee, usually with meaningful equity, who leads the engineering organisation every day.
What each option costs in Greece
Exact numbers move every few months, so treat this as a way to think about cost rather than a price list.
A full-time CTO. In our read of the Greek engineering market, staff and principal engineers at Greek scale-ups earn roughly €80k to €120k gross a year, and seniors working remotely for EU or US employers often earn more. A CTO you would actually trust with the company sits at or above that band. On top of gross salary, a Greek employer pays social security contributions of roughly a fifth of salary, plus equity, equipment and benefits. Then there is the search itself: three to six months is normal for a senior technical leader, and recruiter fees, where you use one, are commonly a significant percentage of the first year's salary.
A fractional CTO. You pay a monthly retainer for a slice of a senior person's time. Because you're buying a few hours a week rather than forty, the monthly cost is a fraction of a full-time package, with no recruiting delay and no equity. The trade-off is availability: a fractional CTO isn't in every stand-up, and you need to protect the time you do have together.
The hidden cost on both sides. The most expensive outcome isn't either salary. It's a wrong early decision, such as the wrong cloud, a data model that can't support the product, or a first engineering hire who isn't senior enough, that takes a year to unwind. Whichever option you choose, the point is to have senior judgement in the room before those decisions are made.
How much time you actually need
Most companies need less CTO time than they think in the early months, and more around specific events:
- Pre-product or MVP: a few hours a week for architecture, vendor choices and reviewing what contractors deliver.
- First engineering hires: more time for a few months, spent on writing roles, interviewing and onboarding.
- Funding round or enterprise deal: a burst of time for due diligence, security questionnaires and architecture documents.
- Steady growth with a small team: a weekly planning session plus availability for decisions.
A good fractional arrangement flexes with these phases instead of locking you into the same hours every month.
Signs you need a fractional CTO now
- You are a non-technical founder and nobody you trust can review what your developers or agency are building.
- An investor or a large customer has sent a technical due diligence or security questionnaire and you don't know how to answer it.
- Your first engineers ship features well but nobody owns architecture, security or the cloud bill.
- You are about to hire your first senior engineers and don't know how to evaluate them.
- Your CTO has left, and you need continuity while you look for the next one.
When to switch to a full-time CTO
The fractional model has a natural end, and a good fractional CTO will tell you when you have reached it. The signals are usually:
- Technical decisions and people management fill a full week, every week.
- The engineering team has grown to the point where it needs a leader present daily, typically once you have several engineers across more than one team.
- You can offer a competitive package, including equity, that a senior leader would take.
The handover matters. The fractional CTO should help write the role, interview candidates and pass on the context: the roadmap, the decisions made and why, and the known risks. If the handover is done well, the new CTO starts from a documented system instead of a blank page.
What the first 90 days look like
- Weeks 1 to 2: understand. Meet the team, read the code, review the cloud setup. We usually run our one-week cloud audit here so the risks are written down.
- Weeks 3 to 4: decide. Agree a 90-day plan with the founders: the two or three technical bets that matter, and what to stop doing.
- Months 2 to 3: deliver. Fix the highest-risk findings, set up the hiring process, and establish a weekly rhythm with the team.
By the end of the quarter you should have a written roadmap, a clear picture of technical risk, and a team that knows who makes which decisions.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours does a fractional CTO work?
It depends on the stage. Early-stage companies often need a few hours a week plus availability for urgent decisions; funding rounds, enterprise deals and first hires need more for a period. A good arrangement flexes with these phases.
Is a fractional CTO cheaper than a full-time CTO?
In monthly cost, yes, because you pay for part of a senior person's time with no recruiting delay or equity. Once technical work fills a full week, a full-time CTO becomes the better investment.
Can a fractional CTO manage developers?
Yes. Setting direction, reviewing work, running hiring and coaching the team are part of the role. Day-to-day management of a larger team is usually the point where you hire full-time.