Fractional IT Director for Funded Startups

The gap you're in

You've outgrown the patchwork: a contractor for network issues, a SaaS admin who set up Okta once, an engineer who "handles AWS." Decisions get made in Slack threads. Security questions from enterprise prospects stall deals. Your next funding round or key hire will surface gaps nobody owns.

You're not ready to hire a six-figure IT Director — and you shouldn't have to. You need one accountable senior operator who sets direction, makes vendor calls, and scales systems as headcount grows.

What a fractional IT Director does

I act as your startup's IT and infrastructure decision-maker on a retained basis — a set number of hours or days per month, or scoped to a specific initiative. You get executive-level ownership, not ticket-queue support.

• Infrastructure and tooling strategy — cloud architecture, identity/SSO, device management, and security posture aligned to how you actually operate
• Vendor evaluation and management — MSPs, security tools, SaaS platforms: evaluated and managed by someone senior, not delegated to the most technical person on the team
• Security and compliance readiness — SOC 2 preparation, security questionnaire support, and due diligence for funding rounds or enterprise sales
• Scaling IT as you hire — onboarding workflows, access provisioning, and systems that keep pace from 15 to 75 people without re-architecting every six months
• Project or ongoing engagement — retained advisor for steady-state leadership, or focused engagement for a migration, audit prep, or infrastructure build-out

Built infrastructure at scale — not outsourced helpdesk

Before Shoreline Systems, I was on the founding infrastructure team at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a deep-tech startup scaling from early stage through significant growth. That work included:

• Identity and access management (Okta) across a rapidly growing workforce
• AWS HPC infrastructure — including a 100K+ CPU cluster featured at AWS re:Invent
• OT and network infrastructure for live experimental environments
• Infrastructure-as-code and operational systems at production scale

This is founding-team-level ownership: designing systems, making tradeoffs, and being accountable for outcomes — the same lens I bring to your infrastructure decisions as a fractional IT Director.

Remote-first, on-site when it matters

Most of this work happens remotely — strategy sessions, vendor reviews, architecture decisions, and compliance prep don't require someone at a desk in Kendall Square five days a week. That's how you get senior leadership without a full-time salary.

When you need someone in the room, I'm there. On-site in Cambridge, Boston, and across Greater Boston for board prep, infrastructure deployments, new-hire onboarding weeks, investor diligence walkthroughs, or anything that benefits from face-to-face. Shoreline Systems is based on the North Shore — not a storefront in the Seaport — and that model is deliberate: you get an operator who scales with you, not a local MSP trying to upsell helpdesk tickets.

Who this is for — and who it isn't