About
Steve Johnson — Fractional CTO & technical cofounder
San Francisco · working remote, worldwide
I've spent my career as a founding or consulting CTO across five startups — AI education, business-English learning, freelance marketplaces, and a multi-tenant content platform. Since early 2026 I've been hands-on with production AI agent orchestration every day, and I build with these tools constantly — the automated system that surfaced and wrote this growth is my own. I'm based in San Francisco and work remotely with teams anywhere.
What I do
Fractional CTO
Own the technical direction part-time — architecture, the hard build-vs-buy calls, code review, and early hiring. For founders who need senior judgment now, not a full-time salary.
AI & agent engineering
Multi-step autonomous agents: tool use, orchestration, structured outputs, and eval discipline. Built against Claude and OpenAI in production daily — including the system that wrote this very growth.
Full-stack product build
Next.js 15 / React 19 / TypeScript front to back, Postgres on Supabase, Stripe, auth, the works. From a Figma file to a deployed app on a current, boring-in-the-good-way stack.
Rescue & due diligence
Take over a codebase and make it safe and fast: migrations, row-level security, CI gates, and the unglamorous production-incident fixes — plus an honest assessment of what you actually have.
Areas of expertise
Fractional CTO · Early-stage startup technical strategy · Production AI agent systems · MCP server design and agent tooling · Full-stack product development · Next.js · TypeScript · Postgres · Codebase rescue · Technical due diligence · CI/CD and production incident response