Five ways to engage.

Architecture Review is the front door for most teams: bounded, written, low risk, easy to act on. The other four engagements pick up from there. Every one starts with a 30-minute call.

Book a 30-minute introduction call

The front door

Architecture Review

A structured diagnostic from people who were in the conversations when your stack’s assumptions got set. We go inside your repos, dashboards, and cloud bill. You get a written report, an executive readout, a technical readout, and a prioritized action list. No open-ended retainer. No mystery invoices. This is the engagement most cost-and-efficiency, migration, and architecture-bet questions start with.

For: CTOs, VPs of Engineering, platform leads, and PE/VC technical diligence partners who need an outside read before a migration, a funding round, or a big architectural bet.
Shape: Scoped per engagement, project fee

The other four

Strategic Advisory Retainer

A standing slot on your calendar for the calls that only get made once. Architecture decisions, migration plans, vendor bake-offs, hiring scorecards. Async review on docs and ADRs between calls. The shape most teams adopt after a Review, when the next quarter is going to keep producing decisions.

For: CTOs, VPs of Data, Heads of Platform, and VC/PE partners who want a recurring senior voice on a portfolio company.
Shape: Retainer, monthly cadence, quarterly commitment

Fractional CDO or CTO

The anchor engagement. We run data or AI infrastructure strategy end to end for a quarter or two. Writing docs, reviewing PRs, owning vendor calls, hiring the team that will replace us. This is where most AI and data-layer problems land once the shape is clear.

For: Series B through pre-IPO companies that need Chief Data or Chief AI Officer caliber decisions without the nine-month search.
Shape: One to three days a week, quarterly commitment

Tiger Team

Project-scoped. Senior operators in the repo with your team. Cassandra migrations, production readiness, performance work, AI data pipelines. We scope a clear outcome, ship it with your engineers, and write the runbook. We do not hand off to juniors.

For: Engineering orgs with a concrete, time-boxed problem and no bandwidth to pull their best people off the roadmap.
Shape: Scoped per engagement, project fee

Bespoke Team Training

Two pillars: Cassandra and cloud-native data, taught for more than a decade. AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows), taught from a year of using them in our own advisory work. On-site or remote. Edited to your team.

For: Engineering teams adopting Cassandra or Kubernetes data workloads, working engineers getting up to speed on AI coding tools, and leadership groups setting strategy on either.
Shape: Scoped per engagement, project fee

Not sure which one fits?

Most engagements start with an Architecture Review or an Advisory Retainer. Both are low-risk ways to find out whether working together makes sense. Fractional and Tiger Team work usually follows one of those. Training shows up at the end, once the team knows what they’re being trained for.

If the problem is already scoped and the deadline is real, skip to Tiger Team. If the problem is vague and political, start with Advisory. If the problem is “we think the architecture is wrong but we aren’t sure,” that’s exactly what the Review is for.

If none of that feels right, just book the call. We’ll help you figure out which shape fits.

What we don't do

We say no to engagements that are a bad fit. The work below isn’t the firm we’re trying to be.

Staff augmentation or body-shop work
Greenfield application development above the data layer
Pure security audits
Open-ended retainers without a defined deliverable
Generalist digital transformation

Full engagement mechanics, terms, and conflicts policy: How we work →

Building a data or AI product?

GTM advisory for data and AI vendors lives on its own page. Same operator, different conversation. Positioning, technical content, DevRel, community, analyst strategy.

For data and AI vendors →

Let’s look at it together.

Every engagement begins with a 30-minute introduction call. No deck, no pitch. Bring us whatever you’re wrestling with. We’ll tell you what we see.

Book a 30-minute introduction call hello@mcfad.in