01 Philosophy
The firm stays small so the principals can do the work.
Cottonwood is a small firm, deliberately. The engineers who scope an engagement are the ones who build it. We spent our careers inside operating companies before we started advising them, and we think that order matters.
Much of what we build is infrastructure in the plain sense: the ledger, the pipeline, the system of record. It gets judged by how rarely anyone has to think about it again.
Narrowleaf Cottonwood
02 Capabilities
The practice covers three areas.
Fractional CTO
We serve as CTO for companies that need one but aren't ready to hire one. In practice that means owning the architecture and roadmap, making the early engineering hires, and sitting with the board when technology is on the agenda.
Technical Advisory
Second opinions for people about to spend money. Build versus buy, AI adoption, vendor selection, diligence on an acquisition. We tell you what we would do if it were our money.
Custom Software
When the right answer is to build, we build it ourselves. Platforms, data infrastructure, and the internal systems a business runs on. No handoff to a delivery team, because there isn't one.
03 Experience
Recent and current work. Most clients described, not named.
Ongoing engineering leadership at a fund-administration software company whose clients administer more than $2 trillion in assets.
Owning hiring across every engineering team, client relationships, and the infrastructure underneath. A reporting redesign cut customer-visible errors 95%, and two SOC 2 audits passed with zero exceptions.
Consulted on serverless architecture and AWS infrastructure for one of the world's largest card networks.
Business-critical workloads held above 99.9% availability. The review-environment patterns we designed became the standard for the consultancy's later engagements.
Platform engineering at a mortgage-technology company through its $1.2B acquisition.
Kubernetes infrastructure carrying all production traffic at 99.95% uptime, twenty-plus releases a day, and an ARM migration that cut compute costs 40%.
Founded and launched a bespoke software company of our own, from a blank page to market.
Product, brand, and platform built entirely in-house. It operates today as a standalone business. Proof we take our own advice.
04 Inquiries