Chief Technology Officer
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Meet FRATCH Chief Technology Officer
Jakob Hess
Last position:
Chief Transformation Officer at Engagement with an internationally active technology group
- Transformation and global scaling (listed in the MDAX)
- Stabilization and professionalization of the ongoing value creation program
- Consistent challenging of the workstreams regarding content, target achievement, and progress, as well as realization of the defined value drivers
- Identification and removal of implementation blockers to ensure execution speed
- Reporting to the Executive Board and Supervisory Board
Ornel Franck Wora Yeno
Last position:
Purchasing Manager, Logistics & IT Manager at Onlinehandler
Proactive support of management in business field development & innovation management
New development of a suite of business applications for analyzing valuation, P&L, and market price risk data
Automation of all internal and external business and work processes
Development of AI-based and AI-supported ETL processes as well as data analysis
Business use-case development
Business and work process optimization
Enterprise architecture management
Sales data analysis and forecasting as well as capture
Inventory management & reordering
Supplier management and communication
Customs processing & clearance
Shipping handling & warehouse coordination
Interface management
Technologies used: Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, JTL-Wawi, JTL-WMS, OTTO Partner Connect (OPC), Amazon Seller Central, DHL Global Forwarding, Jira, Draw.IO, Java (8,17,21,25), Jenkins, SonarQube, Git, Gitea, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Vaadin, H2, PostgreSQL, Docker, Local LLMs, Postman, JasperSoft Studio, JasperReports
Martin Hermann
Last position:
Lead Product Owner at Energy
- Team leadership: Prioritization and coordination of four cross-functional teams.
- Platform strategy: Development and implementation of strategies to optimize existing IT platforms.
- Stakeholder management: Active management of expectations and communication with internal and external stakeholders.
- Program and innovation management: Prioritization and coordination of cross-department projects as well as innovation initiatives.
- Product Owner consulting: Advising Product Owners with a focus on product development and continuous product improvement.
- Organizational development: Improving communication and decision-making structures across all organizational levels.
- Change management: Implementing best-practice change management methods to ensure continuous optimization and innovation.
- Quality assurance: Ensuring high quality standards in processes, services, and deliverables.
Mario Mohar
Last position:
Co-Founder and CTO at B2B SaaS Recruiting Platform
Complete build of a B2B SaaS platform for recruitment agencies
- Multi-source job aggregation via ATS APIs
- AI-assisted career page scraping
- Rule-based and AI-assisted matching
- Credit-based monetization model with Stripe integration
- Live in production since July 2026
Tech stack
- NestJS
- React
- PostgreSQL
- pgvector
- Claude AI
- Prisma
Frank Gulitz
Last position:
Agile Coach and Program Manager at Centris AG
The insurance application service provider in Switzerland intended to develop a multi-channel output system to support their customers on their digital enhancement journey.
- Established an Agile Release Train based on SAFe 6.0
- Trained all ART leadership
- Coached the development of the solution intent
- Established 5 teams in the ART. Developed the Epic and Feature Backlog for the team.
- Planned and coached 2 PI planning sessions
The insurance application service provider in Switzerland intended to transform their claims management BPO and IT team into an agile delivery organization.
- Established an Agile Release Train based on SAFe 6.0
- Trained all ART leadership
- Coached the development of the solution intent
- Established 2 teams in an ART.
- Developed the Epic and Feature Backlog for the team.
- Planned and coached 2 PI planning sessions
Carsten Rösner
Last position:
Enterprise Product Owner at opta data IT GmbH
- Product responsibility for the central platform "one" as a group-wide web-based customer portal
- Coordination of the connection of 20 group companies to the product platform
- Derivation and steering of a group-wide product strategy and roadmap aligned with company goals
- Prioritization and bundling of strategic requirements from the various group companies
- Harmonization of different interests and moderation of complex decision-making processes at management level
- Ensuring the technical and business integration of the product into existing system landscapes, business processes, and business models
- Building transparent governance and decision-making structures for group-wide product development
- Representation of the product towards internal and external stakeholders at leadership level
Jens G.
Last position:
CTO & Member Executive Management
- Executive management (C-level)
- End-to-end ownership: IT, Engineering (SDD & Agentic AI), architecture; teams across DE/ES/RO
- Operational responsibility for scalable platforms (nine-digit annual revenue; global marketplace)
- Launched and scaled an AI-powered AdTech service to >€1M daily revenue
- Integration and alignment with group-level processes (Security, BI, Business IT)
- Corporate strategy development and business planning at executive board level
Wei-Yeh Lee
Last position:
Senior Data Architect at Cooper.ai
- Short-duration architecture and managed-AI-platform evaluation for an AI startup. Evaluated AWS Bedrock, SageMaker and adjacent AWS AI services against the startup's platform and operating requirements, including AWS product demonstrations and SageMaker training.
- Assessed technical fit together with operating economics. Concluded the SageMaker cost structure was too expensive for the startup's needs at that stage, even with available AWS credits. The evaluation did not proceed to production.
- A platform can be technically capable and still be architecturally wrong when its economics do not fit the stage or the workload.
Jorge Machado
Last position:
Technical Lead / Fractional CTO at Würth GmbH
I designed and developed an AI-powered multi-tenant platform on Azure that transforms SAP process recordings into technical documentation, presentations and automated tests, processing over 15,000 process recordings for enterprise customers like Würth. I owned the architecture, the production releases and the DevOps setup. I also designed a multi-tenant system with SSO and role-based access on Azure. Implemented an MCP Server with Dynamic OAuth Authentication.
Main Tasks:
- Sprint planning and feature preparation
- Design the multi-tenant platform architecture (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL row-level security for tenant isolation)
- Develop AI pipelines with Prefect for transcription (Azure Speech API), document generation and SAP screen-recording analysis (Claude, gpt-4-mini)
- Design and implement an MCP server to expose tenant knowledge to LLM clients (Claude), with async retrieval and reranking
- Implement LLM cost tracking, rate limiting and client pooling for Anthropic/OpenAI/Azure OpenAI endpoints
- Set up CI/CD: Docker images to Azure Container Registry, GitHub Actions, Azure Static Web Apps, Alembic migrations in containers
- Manage production releases and execute live data migrations for enterprise customers
- Define engineering standards and architecture patterns for the team
Environment: Azure / Azure Foundry / Python / FastAPI / Prefect / React / PostgreSQL
Markus Kollers
Last position:
Founder & Managing Director at Qrafto UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
- Founding and overall responsibility: Built a B2B SaaS platform for craft and construction businesses from the first line of code to the live launch with the first paying customer; solo founding including full establishment of the company and all business processes.
- Product and technology responsibility: Designed and developed the entire product.
- Infrastructure & DevOps: Managed a Kubernetes/Helm environment including CI/CD, monitoring, and security architecture; GDPR-compliant platform decisions and evaluation of EU-hosted LLM providers.
- Agentic coding as a productivity multiplier: Set up a productive multi-agent environment with Claude Code: up to eight parallel agents in isolated Git worktrees, Telegram-based remote control and monitoring, MCP integrations (e.g., Context7, Playwright for E2E tests), and a builder-critic pattern with custom slash commands (/research, /plan) and compressed project contexts. Result: development throughput on par with a small team while working solo.
- Go-to-market: Independently developed positioning, SEO and direct mail playbook, as well as target group analysis.
- Regulation & finance: Implemented e-invoicing requirements (ZUGFeRD/XRechnung), set up accounting and payment infrastructure, and managed funding and financing options.
Sarah Lazri
Last position:
Founder at Dorthia
- Built a precision regulatory platform combining AI Act readiness, GDPR expertise, and adaptive learning
- Automation & no-code workflows: API integrations with Airtable, Slack, Teams, and ERP systems
- Data governance & bias auditing via automated dataset scanning and bias detection
- Gap analysis & audit simulation: white audits, risk calculators, notified-body preparation
Christoph Pardon
Last position:
ICT DevSecOps Engineer & Security Coordinator at Abraxas Informatik AG
- Interface role with the SOC team; improved incident response time by 45% through structured escalation processes and proactive security monitoring.
- Defined technical standards for a multi-tenant enterprise platform (10+ services), resulting in 30% shorter onboarding time for new clients in the public sector.
- Active knowledge transfer and mentoring of a 6-person team; increased team autonomy and established a sustainable engineering culture.
- Reduced time-to-market by 50% through CI/CD pipeline optimization and the introduction of self-service deployments.
- Stack: GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Nexus, Harbor, ArgoCD, HashiCorp Vault, Grafana, Python, PostgreSQL, Java, Spring Boot, Flyway, Quarkus, JBoss, Loki, Go, Kafka, Kustomize, MongoDB
Lutz Hühnken
Last position:
Fractional CTO, Interim Engineering Manager, Architect at independent
Strategic technology leadership and architecture consulting.
- Fractional CTO & interim management for startups, scale-ups, and enterprises – technical strategy, team building, architecture oversight, and delivery.
- Architecture consulting on cloud-native, distributed, and event-driven systems: reviews, design partnerships, and ongoing advisory.
- Event-driven architecture training – a hands-on 2-day course for engineering teams
- Conference speaker on distributed systems
Rodion Orlinskiy
Last position:
Founder, CTO & Managing Director at MYNR Product Mining GmbH
- Responsible for the architecture and development of an AI-native SaaS platform for industrial product portfolio management.
- Designed the modern data platform architecture on Azure for scalable analytics and enterprise data integration.
- Built enterprise data ingestion and transformation pipelines across complex industrial system landscapes.
- Developed graph-based representations of product structures and dependencies for analytical reasoning.
- Designed and implemented an agentic AI framework for AI-supported decision workflows.
- Built scalable analytical microservices and integrated reporting through modern BI technologies.
- Coordinated backend, AI, and frontend development across the MYNR platform stack.
Fouad Omri
Last position:
CTO at Predapp GmbH
Predapp is a Sovereign AI and Infrastructure company building AI systems that organisations can own, control, and deploy on their terms, with full data sovereignty. As CTO and investor since 2015, leading the development of the Sovereign AI Platform alongside an advisory practice spanning AI strategy for enterprises, fractional CTO engagements, and technical due diligence for VCs, PE, and family offices.
- Architected the Sovereign AI Platform from zero owning technical vision, infrastructure design, and engineering roadmap; currently deployed at a European hospital, an automotive client in Germany, and two US startups, with active commercial discussions with two leading European hosting providers
- Dubai Health Authority (DHA / Nabidh): Designed and trained AI symptom checker and triage system for national 'Doctor for Every Citizen' initiative under HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
- Emirates Airlines: Designed and deployed AI agent for ground personnel accelerating training, improving issue handling, and reducing cost of liquid workforce
- Developed explainable AI triage system piloted at University Hospital Heidelberg and Famagusta Hospital (Cyprus); reduced patient wait times by up to 15% (validation ongoing)
- Built production scheduling engine for US industrial AI startup: RL + Monte Carlo tree search, reducing planning from hours to seconds
- Designed and led the development of semantic search engines using RAG + Knowledge Graphs; developed Agentic Text-to-SQL solution for citizen data scientists
- AI strategy advisory and readiness assessments for enterprise clients, including architecture reviews, maturity assessments, and AI roadmap development
Discover over 15,000 top freelancers
Chief Technology Officer statistics
Aggregated from the professional profiles of matched freelancers.
Experience
21 years
Position duration
3.4 years
Positions per freelancer
11
Top business areas
Information Technology, Product Development, Project Management
Top industries
Information Technology, Professional Services, Banking and Finance
Certification focus areas
Information Technology, Project Management, Product Development
Bachelor's degree or higher
93%
Master's degree or higher
62%
Doctorate
14%
Certifications per freelancer
2
Most common languages
English, German, French
Speak two or more languages
98%
Based on our profile pool as of 21 Aug 2026.
Daily rate distribution
The chart shows how the daily rates of freelancers in this role are distributed, based on recent contracts on our platform. Each bar covers a rate range — its height shows how many freelancers charge within that range.
Average rates for Chief Technology Officer
Rates are based on recent contracts and do not include FRATCH margin.
The average daily rate is the mean of all daily rates from recent contracts of comparable freelancers on our platform.
The median daily rate is the middle value of all daily rates — half of comparable freelancers charge less, half charge more. Unlike the average, it is barely affected by outliers.
Calculated based on our freelancers’ daily rates as of 21 Aug 2026. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.
About the role
What a CTO does
A freelance Chief Technology Officer sets the technical direction and keeps it tied to business goals. They translate product plans into architecture, guide engineering teams, and make sure delivery choices support scale, security, and maintainability.
- Define tech strategy and roadmap
- Review architecture and platform choices
- Lead or coach engineering teams
- Align product, operations, and delivery
- Support hiring, vendor selection, and technical due diligence
Typical engagements
Companies bring in a CTO when they need senior technology leadership without adding a permanent executive too early. This is common in startups building their first product, scale-ups facing technical debt, and established companies modernizing old systems or launching a new digital service.
A freelance CTO is also useful during fundraising, M&A preparation, outsourcing transitions, and periods where the internal tech lead is overloaded. In these situations, the role must combine strategy, hands-on decision making, and calm delivery control.
Skills and tools
A strong CTO understands software architecture, cloud platforms, security basics, DevOps, data flow, and team structure. They should be able to work with product managers, backend and frontend engineers, QA, and infrastructure specialists without losing sight of business impact.
- Architecture reviews for web, mobile, and platform products
- Cloud and infrastructure decisions across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
- Delivery planning with agile teams and technical leads
- Security, reliability, and maintainability checks
- Vendor and technology stack evaluation
What strong CTOs deliver
The best freelance CTOs do more than advise from the side. They create clear decisions, remove technical risk, and leave the team with a structure it can actually run.
They write down priorities, simplify the stack where needed, and spot where speed is being lost through weak architecture or unclear ownership. They also know when to stay hands-on and when to step back so the internal team can take over cleanly.
In the right setup, a CTO can work remote, on-site, or in a hybrid model. For leadership workshops, board-level alignment, or deep system reviews, in-person sessions often help. For roadmap work, architecture input, and team coaching, remote collaboration is usually enough.
Frequently asked questions
Curious about Chief Technology Officer? Here are the answers that come up again and again.
A freelance Chief Technology Officer sets the technology direction and helps the company turn it into delivery. That can include architecture decisions, team structure, tool selection, risk management, and alignment with product or leadership goals. In many cases, the role is part strategist, part technical reviewer, and part team coach.
A freelance CTO makes sense when the company needs senior guidance, but not a full-time executive yet. This often happens during a new product launch, a cloud migration, rapid growth, or when the existing team lacks a clear technical leader. It is also useful when the business needs an outside view on whether the current setup can scale.
A CTO works at a broader level than a tech lead or software architect. A tech lead focuses more on team execution and code quality, while an architect is usually centered on system design. The CTO connects those decisions to business strategy, hiring, delivery, and long-term platform health.
A strong CTO combines technical depth with leadership and clear judgment. They should understand architecture, cloud, security, DevOps, delivery processes, and how to work with product and business stakeholders. Good communication matters just as much as technical knowledge, because the job often involves turning complex trade-offs into simple decisions.
A freelance CTO may deliver a technology roadmap, architecture review, team structure proposal, hiring guidance, or a plan to reduce technical debt. They may also support due diligence, vendor selection, and leadership workshops. The exact output depends on whether the company needs strategy, rescue work, or hands-on oversight.
Often yes, especially for roadmap work, architecture review, and coaching internal teams. But some situations benefit from on-site presence, such as leadership alignment, difficult technical assessments, or periods of major change. The right setup depends on how much context the CTO needs and how close they must be to the team.
Look for clear examples of decisions they made and the results those decisions created. A good Chief Technology Officer can explain how they balanced speed, quality, cost, and risk without hiding behind jargon. Ask how they handled technical debt, team conflicts, and product pressure in past roles.
Yes, many companies use a Chief Technology Officer in that way, especially when leadership needs to be covered quickly. The exact scope should be clear from the start: some engagements are strategic, while others include direct management of engineering leads and delivery routines. The best setup depends on the maturity of the team and how much internal leadership is already in place.
The average hourly rate for Chief Technology Officer is 129 €, which corresponds to a daily rate of about 1,034 € based on an 8-hour working day.
Of the freelancers working as Chief Technology Officer, 93% hold at least a Bachelor's degree, 62% hold at least a Master's degree, and 14% hold a doctorate.
On average, freelancers working as Chief Technology Officer have 21 years of professional experience, with a single engagement typically lasting around 3.4 years.
The most common languages among freelancers working as Chief Technology Officer are English (98%), German (81%), and French (23%).
The most common industries among freelancers working as Chief Technology Officer are Information Technology (93%), Professional Services (52%), and Banking and Finance (50%).
The most common business areas among freelancers working as Chief Technology Officer are Information Technology (96%), Product Development (92%), and Project Management (74%).
FRATCH Chief Technology Officer main locations
Our freelancers and interim experts are at home across the DACH region — available on-site in the major business hubs or fully remote. Choose a location to discover matched specialists, local market insights and up-to-date availability.
Request a free demo
Get in touch with the FRATCH team and we will get back to you within 4 hours.
Would you rather directly get in touch?
We always have the time for a call or email!
Philipp Thomaschewski
FRATCH CEO
