Fractional CTO
in Seattle

Seattle founders have access to deep technical talent that's mostly busy. The candidates who do interview want AWS comp, or are leaving to start their own thing. Either way, your 90-day hiring cycle becomes 180.

Different math: one named senior engineer plus AI agents, Pacific Time, ships in two weeks. Flat-price quote after a 30-minute call. AWS-native by default — Bedrock, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 — same stack your team already runs. Code in your GitHub from commit one. Walk away clean at the end.

Seattle's startup infrastructure runs through Techstars Seattle (alumni have raised over $1B post-graduation) and Pioneer Square Labs, backed by Madrona Venture Group — the Pacific Northwest's anchor fund, currently investing out of a $300M Fund VII — plus newer entrants like Founders' Co-op and the $50M Fortson VC fund launched in 2025. The talent density backs it up: CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report ranked Seattle #2 in North America for tech talent two years running, behind only the Bay Area, with the Puget Sound region adding nearly 25,000 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025. AI is pulling its share too — local AI startups alone raised $679M in the first eight months of 2025. None of that changes the math for a seed-stage founder: Amazon and Microsoft set the local salary floor, and neither is going anywhere.

Seattle's 2025-2026 story is really about churn, not just growth: Amazon cut roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in October 2025, then another 16,000 or so about three months later; Microsoft has cut 15,000+ jobs globally since May 2025, including over 3,200 in Washington state alone. That's a lot of senior engineering talent hitting the market at once — talent that trained at places like the University of Washington's Allen School, tied for #7 nationally in graduate CS with average starting salaries around $110K. On the funding side, Madrona runs Create33, a dedicated founder hub a floor below its own office, and Flying Fish Partners writes $500K-$1.5M pre-seed and seed checks exclusively into AI and ML infrastructure. The city isn't short on engineers right now — it's short on companies moving fast enough to hire them before Amazon or Microsoft does again.

Most of the fractional cto briefs we get out of Seattle trace back to its B2B SaaS and Enterprise tech base — that's the local demand, not a guess.

Hiring one senior leader here is a ~$310K year-one outlay and a 60–90 day search. Our fractional cto engagement starts at $2,000 with a first deploy in Monthly engagement.