Technology leadership for the messy middle.
I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub, a fractional CTO. For more than thirty-five years I've helped founders set strategy, build and lead teams, and ship software that scales. These days that includes helping teams put AI agents inside a real engineering process, not treat them as a shortcut around one. I'm as at home in the boardroom as in the codebase, and I still write code when it moves the work forward. I bring clarity, structure, and calm execution to the stretch where things are unclear and fragile.
Build with AI agents, not around them.
Most engineering teams have adopted AI as autocomplete. Others chase agentic development for speed, then watch quality, control, and maintainability suffer.
The teams getting durable velocity gains treat agents as participants in a real software development lifecycle, tuned for the pace agents set. That means executable specifications, review gates that hold generated code to the same or better standard than anything a human wrote, and observability the agents themselves can read and act on.
It also changes the shape of the team. When writing code is no longer the primary constraint, bottlenecks move to everything around it. What works is small multidisciplinary teams owning problems end to end, with product, design, engineering, and quality in the same loop, shipping increments small enough to verify and big enough to deliver real customer value.
I work with engineering leaders and executive teams on getting there, and I build this way as a studio: a shared product stack with an agent team I run myself, so the practice stays grounded in current tools rather than theory.
Senior technical leadership, without the full-time hire.
I embed in your team and own the technology outcomes: strategy, architecture, security, hiring, delivery, and how you put AI to work. You get a CTO who joins the hard conversations and is just as comfortable in the codebase as in the boardroom.
Advisory
Monthly retainer for steady guidance and accountability. A senior sounding board on call.
Fractional
Part-time executive leadership inside your team, owning the technology roadmap and the people who deliver it.
Project
A defined initiative with clear outcomes, budget, and timeline. We agree on the finish line up front.
A few things I've built and helped build.
Turned around a 98point6 engineering organization that had missed SLAs for six consecutive quarters, hitting 100% attainment in five of the next six.
Led product engineering for a healthcare platform that used AI to help practitioners care for patients, with HIPAA and SOC 2 controls for protected health data.
Helped grow RealNetworks from 20 people to more than 1,500 and an IPO, building the core technology of streaming media.
Built the first behavioral ad-targeting platform, running billions of transactions a day.
Worked with dozens of founders to get their ideas off the ground, raising more than $100M in venture rounds.
Scaled platforms to millions of users, and modernized brittle systems without stopping delivery.
Artificer Innovations ships its own products.
Building products keeps me sharp on the work I advise clients on. A shared foundation and a small, senior team let one practice run several at once. If you arrived here from one of these, you've found the shop behind it.
Skein
Live
Sufficit
LiveAnd experiments in the open.
Open source tools and early ideas. Some stay small. Others grow up and move to Ventures.
BeakerStack
Open sourceI stay close to the work without getting in the way. Sometimes that is strategy, leadership, and the hard calls. Sometimes it is writing code, reviewing code, or shaping the process around agents so standards stay high while the work moves. The best technology decisions come from people who trust each other enough to wrestle with hard problems and stay aligned when the path isn't clear.
I've spent years in the mountains as an avalanche educator and a search-and-rescue responder, making calls with incomplete information and real consequences. That's the same steadiness I bring to scaling a system or preparing a founder for a raise.
I co-host How Many CTOs Does It Take?, a podcast on what it takes to scale technical teams, and I keep a candid guide to how I work alongside a team.
Read the User's Manual →Tell me where you are, and where you want to go.
Every company's path is different. If you're weighing fractional leadership, an advisory relationship, or a scoped project, let's talk.