Fractional CTO support
Senior technology leadership without a full-time hire — for founders and scale-ups who need a steady hand.
Nathan John · Fractional CTO · LondonA technology leader & fractional CTO,
A technology leader & fractional CTO,
hands-on builder & AI researcher.
Helping teams make better technical decisions — from strategy and architecture through to delivery.
I've led technology in startups, scale-ups, games, machine learning, and digital products, and I like staying close enough to the work to know what will actually ship.
What I help with
What I should build, how to build it, and which decisions support the business.
I combine leadership, product understanding, and hands-on technical depth — across startups, scale-ups, games, machine learning and digital products.
Technical strategy
Deciding what to build and why, so technical choices support the business rather than slow it down.
Software architecture
Systems that are clear enough to understand, robust enough to rely on, and practical enough to ship.
Product & engineering leadership
Building teams, setting cadence, and staying close to the work to keep delivery honest.
Technical due diligence
Helping VCs and investors evaluate a technology offering — risks, strengths, and what it would take to scale.
Vendor & platform decisions
Cutting through options to the choice that fits the team, the budget, and the next two years.
0outages
Enrolment stopped falling over at peak after migrating off WordPress onto Next.js + AWS Lambda — invisibly, mid-season.
+17%
Uplift in extra-credit purchases from a new booking system at Wildkind.
4platforms
Shipped Standpoint to PC, Mac, Linux & Xbox One as sole core programmer.
10+ yrs
Leading and mentoring engineering teams across games, ML and web.
Selected projects
A bit of range — founder, researcher, and builder.
A few things I've worked on in my time
Product · SaaS · Tools
KitTracker
A web app for event kit managers to check equipment in and out at festivals, tours, and live productions — full audit trail, real-time availability across a whole event.
Why it mattersProof I can ship a real product: designed, built, and launched solo — multi-tenant auth, Paddle billing, CSV import. One person, full stack, in production.
Founder / Full-stack engineer
Read case study Next.jsTypeScriptNeon PostgresPaddle
Founder · Product
Unruly Attractions / Standpoint
Indie studio I founded and a first-person puzzle game shipped across four platforms.
Why it mattersFounder-level product and building experience — sole programmer, leading an international team of artists, designers and musicians end-to-end.
Founder / Programmer
Read case study UnrealC++Console SDKsLive ops
Research · AI
Adversarial Behaviour Debugging
PhD research into finding and explaining failure modes in learned agent behaviour.
Why it mattersTechnical depth and originality — novel methods for probing where ML systems break and why.
PhD researcher
Read case study PythonRLML tooling
Play · Live experiments
Jump, Die, Repeat
A playground for live AI and game systems experiments, built in the open.
Why it mattersCuriosity made visible — fast iteration on game/AI ideas and live experimentation.
Builder
Case study coming soon TypeScriptGame systemsAI
Other things I'm building
A small-batch jerk-seasoning project, the occasional Twitch stream, and whatever else is on the bench this month.
About Nathan John
I'm Nathan — Nate to most people — a technology leader and hands-on builder based in London. I've worked across startups, scale-ups, games, machine learning, web platforms and consulting, usually somewhere between strategy, architecture, product and delivery. I'm interested in technology that fits the organisation using it: clear enough to understand, robust enough to rely on, and practical enough to actually ship.
More about me