5 Reasons Startups Need a Fractional CTO for Azure
Discover why startups need a fractional CTO for Azure to drive innovation, scalability, and cost-efficiency in their cloud infrastructure.
Hey, I'm Josh 👋
I'm a seasoned Principal Engineer and Fractional CTO with a deep focus on DevOps, Software Engineering, Platform Architecture, and AI.
With over 15 years of hands-on experience, I specialize in building, scaling, and managing robust, high-quality solutions, particularly for SaaS and AI-driven applications.
Across my career, I've navigated the entire development and maintenance lifecycle, tackling challenges from full-stack development and network engineering to infrastructure management and strategic team leadership. I have a proven track record of delivering impactful results for diverse clients, from global enterprises to startups.
While many Fractional CTOs focus on the business/executive side, I make sure to spend most of my time in the trenches actively engineering products
Experience
Platform Engineer DevOps Consultant
Apr 2025 - Present
Marks and Spencer
- London Area, United Kingdom · Remote
- • Advisory and engineering services related to dev and data platform engineering for multiple global websites, and apps.
- • Consumer appstore apps as well as internal systems used in warehouses.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Sep 2024 - Present
Equal Experts
- South Africa · Remote
- • DevSecOps
- • GitHub
- • Consulting
- • Cloud-Native Architecture
- • DevOps
- • API Development
- • Cloud Security
Senior DevOps / Data / Platform Engineer
Sep 2024 - Mar 2025
Merlin Entertainments
- London Area, United Kingdom · Remote
- • Built the Merlin Digital Platform on Azure
- • Migrated to the Data Platform team and helped improve operations and maintainability of the Databricks infrastructure
- • Keen focus on AI/MLops pipelines
Consulting CTO
Jan 2018 - Jan 2025
Unique Ventilation and Support Systems
- South Africa · Hybrid
- • Planned and executed a complete migration from all managed IT infrastructure owned by their parent holding group
- • Migration of all data from legacy macsteel exchange / ActiveDirectory to hybrid cloud Azure AD & Office 365
- • Migration of BCX hosted Syspro ERP to own servers
- • Brand new national multi-branch IT infrastructure design and implementation
Staff Platform Engineer
Oct 2024 - Dec 2024
Nuuly
- United States · Remote
- • Architecting scalable cloud infrastructure for a cutting-edge FMCG ecommerce subscription platform
Tools & Technologies
AWS
Azure
Kubernetes
Docker
GitHub
Terraform
Visual Studio Code
Databricks
Google Cloud Platform
Alibaba Cloud
Digital Ocean
Fly.io
Cloudflare
Vercel
GitLab
Bitbucket
Jira
Linear
PostgreSQL
MySQL
MongoDB
SQLite
Redis
ClickHouse
RavenDB
Apache Kafka
Airbyte
Fivetran
React
Vue.js
Svelte
SvelteKit
Next.js
Vite
.NET
Laravel
Blazor
Microsoft 365
Cisco
Mikrotik
Fortinet
Juniper Networks
Azure Maps
SAP
Syspro
Xero
Stripe
Paddle
Polar.sh
Zoho
Ubuntu
Windows Server
Pinecone
Google Maps Xero Zoho
DBT
Vultr
Hetzner
C++
Golang
C#
Lua
PHPGet in Touch
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