What "fractional" means at Arclight

You get me, a senior engineer with 15+ years of shipped production software, for a fixed slice of every week. There's no agency account manager relaying messages to a rotating team. I join your workflow (Slack, standups, your repo, your issue tracker), own real deliverables, and ship them every week.

When a fractional engineer is the right call

• You have steady technical work but not 40 hours of it. A product in maintenance-plus-features mode rarely justifies a full-time salary.
• You need senior judgment. Architecture decisions, AI feasibility calls, and code review benefit from experience more than headcount.
• You want AI or computer vision expertise on tap. Hiring a full-time ML engineer is expensive and hard; most products need one part-time.
• You're between hires. Keep shipping while you search, with clean code and documentation ready to hand off.

How the retainer works

Retainers are monthly with a set weekly hour range. Most clients land between 10 and 20 hours per week. That includes development, code review, architecture guidance, and a weekly check-in. You see progress continuously in a shared staging environment, and you can scale hours up or down month to month as your roadmap changes. There's no long-term lock-in and no full-time contract.

For well-defined builds, a scoped, milestone-based project is often the better fit. Many clients start with a project and move to a retainer for ongoing support and iterationafter launch.

What you get that you won't from a full-time hire

• Short ramp-up: I've picked up dozens of existing codebases, so there's no three-month onboarding curve
• Breadth: computer vision and AI, full-stack web, data pipelines, and infrastructure from one person
• Predictable cost: a flat monthly retainer instead of salary, benefits, equity, and recruiting fees
• No politics: I'm there to ship the work, with no team or title to build

The first step is a conversation

Every engagement starts with a free discovery call about your product, your roadmap, and whether a fractional arrangement fits. If it doesn't, I'll say so and point you at a better option.