Denver Based
Fractional CTO / VP Eng / Technical Advisor
👋 Hi, I'm Byron.
I Craft Teams that
Build Great Software
I create the team and technical strategy to bring your vision the world.
Denver Based
Fractional CTO / VP Eng / Technical Advisor
I create the team and technical strategy to bring your vision the world.
We specialize in assembling and guiding high-performing software engineering teams. This approach includes rapidly deploying experienced engineers to initiate development, establishing comprehensive systems with CI/CD deployments, backups, recovery processes, documentation, and test coverage.
If you don't have a team, we recruit and mentor your full-time team members to ensure a seamless transition and sustained success as they take over. Engagements typically span 6 to 12 months, after which you have a well tuned, high performance team.
Pain Point 1: Finding Staff-Level Engineers is Hard
Hiring experienced, staff-level engineers is one of the hardest challenges in tech. These veterans are rare, in high demand, and often command salaries upwards of $400K/year at companies like Google, Meta, Apple, Netflix, or Amazon. Competing with those giants is tough—especially if your project doesn’t have the complexity, scale, or reputation to keep these engineers engaged.
Yet, these seasoned engineers are critical to the success of a new project. Early architectural decisions can make or break everything down the line, and getting those decisions right requires deep expertise.
If we take on your project, one of our 20+ year veteran Staff Engineers (ex-Apple, ex-Google, ex-Nest, etc.) will lead the entire program. This isn’t someone sitting on the sidelines—they lead the program with a hands-on approach. They meet with stakeholders to define the architecture and roadmap, seamlessly navigating conversations with executives, board members, and engineers alike.
But they don’t just plan—they build. They write the code, set quality standards, conduct code reviews, and cultivate a culture of excellence. If needed, they’ll bring in other TeamCraft experts to help move things forward. At the same time, they hire full-time engineers to staff your in-house team, mentoring them on best practices and preparing them to take full ownership of the product.
Pain Point 2: Interviewing is Hard
Knowing how to identify great engineers is a skill in itself, and it’s one many companies struggle with. If you don’t already have senior technical leaders in-house, how do you even begin to evaluate candidates? What questions do you ask? How do you assess their problem-solving ability, technical depth, and cultural fit?
Our TeamCraft engineers have conducted hundreds of interviews for companies like Apple, Google, and Nest. We know what to look for, how to structure interviews, and how to identify the right candidates for your needs. We can take the guesswork out of the process, ensuring you bring in people who not only meet your technical requirements but also align with your company’s goals and values.
Pain Point 3: Building a Great Team Culture is Hard
Even if you find the right engineers, getting them to stay and excel requires more than competitive pay—it requires a team culture they want to be part of. Engineers thrive in environments where they feel valued, supported, and challenged. Without a strong engineering culture, even the best hires can lose motivation or leave for greener pastures.
We don’t just find and hire engineers—we craft the team culture. From day one, we foster collaboration, establish engineering best practices, and set clear standards for quality and communication. We build teams where engineers feel excited to contribute and grow, creating an environment that attracts and retains top talent.
Pain point 4: Building a High Quality Product is Hard
Software development isn’t easy—it’s a balancing act of priorities. The company needs features yesterday, engineers feel the pressure to deliver fast, and suddenly corners get cut. Tech debt starts piling up: poorly documented code, skipped tests, quick fixes that break later. Over time, the system becomes a tangled mess, harder to maintain and scale. In some cases, the only option is to throw it all out and start over.
The good news? With decades of experience building software at scale, we’ve probably tackled a similar problem before. Our approach isn’t just about delivering quickly—it’s about delivering right. We mentor your team to craft a product that’s both sustainable and elegant, balancing speed with long-term maintainability.
We guide the team in writing clean, well-documented code, setting up CI/CD pipelines for fast and reliable deployments, and establishing best practices to prevent tech debt from creeping in. The result? A product that’s ready to ship quickly and easy to enhance later.
Recruiting Firms are Pretty Ok. Sometimes Fine.
Recruiting firms get paid to place bodies in roles. If you need only one or two roles filled, AND you are able to interview well to decide on a condidate's technical skills and the culture they will excel in, then this can be a fine way to go.
For a similar cost, a TeamCraft vetern will do the interviewing and the hiring and take that workload off your plate, and then they personally lead the team. If we made a bad hire, we are there to fix it.
We provide a white glove hiring experience that is unmatched by regular recruiters.
Maybe some of this resonates with you?
Step 1: A Veteran Engineer Leads the Way
When we take on your project, one of our 20+ year veterans (ex-Apple, ex-Google, ex-Nest) steps in to lead with a hands-on approach. This leader collaborates with stakeholders to define the architecture, establish the roadmap, and set the tone for the project. They don’t just oversee; they actively build, ensuring every decision is informed by experience and focused on delivering excellence.
Step 2: Building Begins Immediately
Our engineers start coding right away. With professionals from top organizations like Google, Apple, and Nest, we’re passionate about creating new products. At this stage, we define user stories, finalize the architecture, and begin development. For you, this means rapid progress and a foundation built for quality and scalability.
Step 3: Hiring Your Full-Time Team
We begin hiring your full-time team early, often led by our CEO, Byron. Finding the right people is challenging, so we leverage decades of hiring experience to ensure we recruit individuals who align with your vision and culture. This process is deliberate, identifying engineers who can grow with your company and your product.
Step 4: Crafting an Elegant Product Ecosystem
Our work doesn’t stop at the product. We build a complete ecosystem: CI/CD pipelines, backups, recovery processes, documentation, test coverage, and clean, well-organized code. This approach makes onboarding new engineers seamless and ensures your product is easy to maintain and scale.
Step 5: Transitioning to Your Full-Time Team
We hire and train your full-time team directly into your company. These engineers, often a smaller group than the initial development team, become your employees. They are mentored and prepared to take over fully, equipped with the skills and knowledge to maintain and grow your product.
Step 6: Handing Over a Fully Operational Team
Once your new team is running smoothly, we gradually step back, usually after 6 to 12 months. By the time we leave, you have a high-quality, well-trained team capable of taking your product into the future. And while we step back, we’re always available if you need us.
The result?
We deliver more than a working project and a happy team. We deliver a foundation for your future.
You get a great product and a great team -you get a high-quality, elegantly designed solution built on strong engineering principles. Along with it comes a motivated, well-trained team embedded in a culture of excellence. This team isn’t just ready to maintain the product but to grow it, adapt it, and drive it forward into the future.
We get to do what we love - tackle exciting, meaningful projects, building the teams to bring them to life, and mentoring talented individuals. It’s a rare privilege, even in larger organizations, to help shape not just great products but the teams and cultures that sustain them. We're lucky we get to do this.
Your new team gets to level up - they get world-class mentorship and the opportunity to take their careers to the next level.
Free introductory meeting with Byron.
I just enjoy trading good stories, so if you have any, we should chat. If we are also both see potential in working together, we can schedule a deep dive.
Deep Dive.
We take a few weeks to really understand your organization, your roadmap, the personalities involved, and the goals. At the end we deliver a strategy and a team structure for getting you to those goals. You can use this strategy on your own, or you can have us help you build it out.
Build it.
We start building and hiring, usually within a week or two.
C2C Agreements
We prefer straightforward C2C agreements. As a fully insured and bonded corporation, you pay only for our services—no W2s, no tax headaches. We are never considered employees of your company, but the full-time emploees we bring in are hired directly into your organization. It’s a clean and simple structure that works for everyone.
Monthly Retainer, No Long-Term Commitment
We work on a monthly retainer. This sets clear expectations for all of us, and ensures your project gets our full attention. Our focus is on building strong relationships and delivering success. If it turns out we’re not the right fit, no hard feelings—we’ll part ways professionally. You keep all the code we’ve written and the hires we’ve placed.
Your Hires, No Markups
The full-time people we hire for you join your organization directly. We don’t make money by skimming markup on employees; our job is to build your team and your product. Given that recruiters like to charge 25% of the new hire's yearly salary, it's not much more expensive to hire us.
We Stay Until It’s Done
Building a great team takes time, and we’re here for the entire journey. We don’t leave until the job is done, ensuring your team and product are set up for long-term success.
I (Byron) genuinely enjoy hearing about interesting engineering problems.
If you have one of those, then by all means schedule a short half hour, no cost, video chat.