Fractional CTO
Lead & elevate teams
I embed with your organization to lead development teams, establish workflows that hold under pressure, and build a culture of engineering excellence.
See in detail
Available for new engagements
Modernize what your team dreads.Automate what it repeats.
Senior technical leadership for small and mid-sized companies. Your engineers stop maintaining the past and get back to the business. It starts with an analysis, not a proposal.
You already know something is wrong
Most companies that call me are not short of engineers. They are short of a decision nobody senior enough has been able to make. Four symptoms come up again and again — one for each way I work.
Delivery keeps slipping
Estimates hold up in planning and fall apart in the sprint. The cause is usually structural — the system fights every change — and nobody has had the time to prove it.
A system nobody wants to touch
The codebase that runs the business is the one your team is most afraid to change — so change stops happening.
AI is on the roadmap, undefined
There is pressure to do something with AI and no clear read on where it would genuinely pay off versus where it would burn a quarter.
The CTO seat is empty
The decisions that need senior judgement — architecture, vendors, what to rewrite first — are the ones waiting on nobody in particular. Hiring a full-time CTO to make six of them a month is an executive salary for occasional work.
Four ways I work with you
From diagnosis to embedded technical leadership — applied where it actually hurts. Each one is explained in full on the services page.
System Architecture
Objective decisions
Vendor-agnostic evaluations, scalable architecture design, and technical roadmapping that holds up beyond the next quarter.
See in detailLegacy Modernization & Engineering Consulting
Turn debt into assets
Strategic refactoring and cloud migrations that make an aging codebase resilient without halting the business — and the engineering practice around it: how your team designs, reviews and ships, so the new system does not decay the way the last one did.
See in detailApplied AI
Start from the work
Most AI projects start from the model and end as a demo nobody uses. I start from your week — which tasks your people repeat, what each costs in hours, and which of them an LLM or an agent can take over reliably. Then that one gets built and put into production.
See in detailAnalysis before code
Every engagement opens the same way: I find the real constraint before anyone writes a line. It is the cheapest part of the work and it decides everything after it.
Immersion
Weeks 1–2
Inside your codebase, your team, and your metrics — watching where delivery actually stalls rather than where it is reported to stall.
The constraint
Week 3
A short written plan that attacks the single bottleneck holding everything else back, not the entire wishlist.
Continuous delivery
Week 4 →
Embedded in your rituals, shipping to production alongside your team, and transferring the reasoning so it outlasts the engagement.
What you walk away with
The analysis is not a slide deck. It produces documents your team keeps and uses, whether or not we work together afterwards.
Architecture assessment
A written map of your system: its coupling points, its failure modes, and where it will break next as you grow.
Ranked risk register
The technical risks you are carrying, ordered by what each one costs you if it is left alone.
Prioritized roadmap
A sequenced plan tied to business outcomes, with the reasoning behind the order made explicit.
Decision records
Vendor-neutral recommendations with the trade-offs written down, so future decisions inherit the context.
Who you are actually hiring
Sealmind is Victor Oliveira.
Eight years building and leading software, spent on the problems that show up after the first version ships — architecture that has to survive growth, teams that have to move faster without breaking things, and legacy systems that still run the business. You work directly with me. Nothing is handed to a junior once the contract is signed.
- Experience
- 8 years in software
- Based in
- Setúbal, Portugal
- Working languages
- English, Portuguese
- Independence
- Vendor-neutral, no referral fees
Questions worth asking first
No. I work with the team you have. Most of the value is in making the engineers you already employ more effective, and in transferring the reasoning so your team keeps it after I leave.
The analysis phase runs about three weeks. What follows depends on what the analysis finds — some engagements end there with a plan your team executes, others continue as embedded leadership over several months.
The analysis is fixed-scope, so you know the cost before it starts. Anything beyond it is quoted against what the analysis actually found, rather than estimated blind. I would rather scope it honestly on a call than publish a number that turns out to be wrong for your situation.
Yes. Tick the NDA box in the form or mention it on the call, and we will put one in place before you share anything specific.
Primarily remote, from Setúbal, Portugal. On-site visits are possible for kickoffs and for the immersion phase where being in the room genuinely helps.
No, and it is often the most useful thing I do. A focused technical review — of an architecture decision, a vendor choice, or a plan you are about to commit to — is a legitimate engagement on its own.
Client work is being prepared for publication. Ask on a call and I will walk you through relevant engagements directly.