Fractional CTO for software teams in Germany

What a Fractional CTO does in your company

A Fractional CTO is the senior technical lead of your software team for a fixed number of days each month. The CTO answers for the technology of your product: its architecture, the path of code into production, the quality of releases and the growth of the team.

The difference to an IT head is the product. As noba-experts.de puts it, the IT-Leiter makes sure the company can work, and the CTO makes sure its products succeed in the market (noba-experts.de). An Interim CTO does the CTO’s work full time for a limited period, for example after a CTO has left.

The first two weeks: questions I ask your software team

At the start of an engagement I go through these questions with your developers. The answers decide what I work on first.

Question	What I look at	A warning sign
Who can deploy to production?	Rights in the repository, the pipeline and the cloud account	One person holds the only access
How does code reach production?	The path from merge request to release	Files copied to the server by hand
What runs before a merge?	Tests and checks in the CI	Tests exist, and nobody runs them
Where are decisions written down?	Architecture notes, README files, tickets	Knowledge sits in one person’s head
Where are passwords and keys?	Secret storage and environment variables	Keys committed to the repository
What may an AI coding agent do?	Its credentials and the rules it reads	An agent with write access to production
Who can take over from whom?	Code ownership and on-call duty	A system only one developer understands
What does the next release contain?	The backlog and its priorities	Nobody can name the date

My technology leadership, newest first

• Since April 2026: AI Engineer in Platform Transformation. With Claude and Codex I help a client break up a monolithic application; the agents work under the same rules as the human team. Details: AI agents under the same rules as humans.
• 2022 to October 2024: at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer from January 2023. In summer 2022 I wrote the concept of a real-time market data product over WebSocket and RPC, coordinated development, infrastructure, product and sales, and led the rollout.
• 2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt. I programmed the Angular front end of a contract management portal, designed its interfaces and connected an existing CRM.
• 2011 to 2016: Project Lead and Developer at Valentins (Burda Digital). I led projects and programmed front ends and back ends for at least five e-commerce sites, among them shops for Lidl and REWE.
• 2004 to 2010: Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer of a company that built a global real estate database.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, and I live in Frankfurt. At Claude Hacker House I teach prompting, AI-assisted workflows, MCP servers and virtual organizations, and I take part in the Claude Certified Architect Foundations program. I build software with Claude and Codex, and I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. Details: Teaching and certifications.