PIMASIBook a callEngineering leadership and software delivery for businesses that build software
PIMASI is the engineering function for businesses where software is the work. Leadership when you need calibrated technical judgement in the room. Delivery when you need the code to actually ship. Both when the work calls for both.
01 — Where I come in
Owners and founders rarely arrive with a codebase problem. They arrive having lost confident judgement over their software, and every standard response (replacing the team, hiring more, buying more tooling) has failed to restore it.
Headcount has gone up. Contractor invoices have gone up. The roadmap has not. Sprints close, demos look fine, and you have no calibrated reference inside the business for what the team's spend should be buying. AI tooling has widened that gap, not closed it.
Whether to rewrite the codebase. Whether to hire a senior or three juniors. Whether a vendor quote is reasonable. The questions land on your desk because someone has to make the call, and you have nothing inside the business that can tell you the right answer.
You can interview developers. You cannot reliably tell a strong senior from a confident one. The cost of getting this hire wrong is six months and a stalled roadmap, not just one salary.
Your go-to-market is ready. The product is not. Every week the build slips is revenue you cannot recover.
The first version closed the first cohort of customers. The codebase cannot absorb the pivot, the second cohort, or the next investor demo. A rebuild has already been mentioned.
The product works, but it cannot carry the next stage. Performance, downtime, or fragility is the reason expansion plans are on hold.
02 — Services
Engagements range from a few hours of advisory a week to embedded leadership during critical phases. Hireable independently or together, never as staff-augmentation by the day.
Architecture, vendor and stack decisions, technical due diligence on rebuilds and acquisitions, AI-augmented team assessment. The senior read on the technical decision in front of you, without hiring a permanent CTO.
Hands-on engineering that ships. Solo MVP builds, performance and refactor work, V2 rebuilds, embedded build alongside an existing team. Code in the codebase, not advice from the sidelines.
Sourcing, interviewing and calibrating senior engineers. The hire you cannot reliably interview for, done by someone who can. Onboarding and engineering practices that survive the people who built them.
Turning customer conversations into a sequenced plan. Joining founder sales calls when that is where the roadmap is actually decided. Closing the loop between what buyers ask for and what the team ships next.
When an engagement needs more than one, the same operator runs all of them. No advisor-deliverer handoff to translate across. No second invoice.
03 — Proof
Names withheld. The metrics are exact. Each engagement is a different mix of advisory, delivery, hiring and roadmap work, sized to the business and the moment.
The founder did not trust the codebase. The calculation engine was slow enough to undermine confidence in customer demos.
87% reduction in calculation engine runtime in under two months. The founder went from avoiding the codebase to actively demoing it.
The founder needed market validation and a working prototype ready for the moment a discovery call turned serious. PIMASI built the entire MVP solo, in parallel with the founder running discovery.
Inside three months: a signed Letter of Intent and a pilot agreement.
The roadmap was driven by guesses, not customer signal. PIMASI joined the founder's sales calls, distilled feedback into a roadmap, and worked alongside the founder on the build.
Sellable MVP shipped in six months, with a roadmap drawn directly from buyer conversations.
04 — How I work
Same person
Judgement and code from one operator. No advisor-deliverer split, no warm bodies by the day. When the engagement needs both pillars, you get them from one person.
Outcome led
Every engagement is built to leave the business treating software as a lever, not a risk. Success is defined up front and measured against the business, not the backlog.
Honest
If something is the wrong call, including hiring me, I will tell you. The engagements that should not exist are the most expensive ones to discover halfway through.
05 — Writing
Does my startup need a CTO? Usually not yet. What most startups need is senior technical judgement at the decisions that count, a cheaper and faster hire.
ReadFractional CTO cost in the UK runs £700 to £1,500 a day, or £2,000 to £10,000+ a month. What drives the price, and how it compares with a full-time hire.
ReadFractional CTO vs consultant, advisor and NED: who decides, who delivers, and who owns the outcome. The four roles compared, and when each one is the right buy.
ReadThirty minutes. No slides, no pitch. We talk through your situation and whether PIMASI is the right call.
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