Davide Mendolia

Fractional CTO for seed-to-Series B startups

I help founders make the right engineering decisions at the right time: from first hire to scalable platform.

Expertise

I'm a technology leader with two decades of experience scaling platforms and engineering organizations from idea validation prototype to series A company.

I specialize in solving complex frontend and backend challenges, leading cross-functional teams, and mentoring engineers into leaders. My superpower? Turning ambiguity into velocity—without burning out the team.

My core strengths include agile execution, ROI-driven tech strategy, systems architecture, DevOps, security, and data/AI infrastructure. I believe in building teams through mentorship and creating cultures that enable sustainable growth.

Architecture

Microservices, Kubernetes, Event-Driven Systems

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, GCP, Terraform, Datadog

Data & AI

Pipelines, ML deployment, Analytics

Security

OWASP, IAM, GDPR Compliance

Leadership

Team scaling, OKRs, Agile, CI/CD

Mobile

Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, CI/CD for Apps

How I Help

Strategic technical leadership for startups and scale-ups

Technical Strategy & Architecture

Design scalable systems aligned with business goals. Conduct architecture reviews to identify bottlenecks and optimize for growth.

Team Design & Hiring

Build high-performing engineering teams from scratch. Define roles, hiring pipelines, and career frameworks that scale with your company.

Delivery Acceleration

Unblock engineering bottlenecks and accelerate roadmap execution. Implement agile practices that drive velocity without sacrificing quality.

Interim Leadership

Step in during transitions or critical growth phases. Provide steady technical leadership while you find your permanent CTO or VP Engineering.

Technical Due Diligence

Evaluate technology stacks, technical debt, and team capabilities for investors. Provide clear assessments of technical risk and opportunity.

DevOps & Platform Engineering

Build reliable, observable infrastructure. Implement CI/CD, monitoring, and security practices that enable confident, rapid deployment.

How Engagements Work

I work alongside founders, not above them. Every engagement is shaped around what you actually need right now.

Fractional CTO

1-2 days per week, ongoing. I embed with your team as a hands-on technical leader: setting architecture direction, running hiring, coaching engineers, unblocking delivery. Best for companies that need senior engineering leadership but aren't ready for a full-time CTO.

Technical Advisory

Focused engagements of 1-8 weeks. Architecture reviews, MVP assessments, technical due diligence for investors, or a second opinion before a critical build decision. Clear scope, clear deliverable.

Starting Point

Most engagements begin with a single conversation. No proposals until I understand the problem. Get in touch

Key Achievements

Measurable impact across platforms, teams, and organizations

Platform Scaling

Scaled topi's financing platform to onboard hundreds of enterprise merchants, including MediaMarkt and CoolBlue.

Onboarding Optimization

Reduced merchant onboarding time from 6 weeks to 1 week through platform modularization and no-code configuration layers.

Observability

Introduced a fully observable stack, significantly reducing production incident debugging time.

Mobile Architecture

Modularized Reach PLC's mobile codebase, enabling component reuse across multiple branded applications.

Banking Innovation

Built Velo Bank Mobile App for East West Bank, overseeing architecture, delivery, and mobile-first banking UX.

Rapid Delivery

Delivered El Corte Inglés mobile app MVP and Wizink BNPL integration in under 3 months each.

Products

Products I've shipped alongside client work.

Visus

Know who clicks before you trust them.

Link intelligence and fraud detection. Wraps your links with browser fingerprinting and real-time risk scoring to filter bots and bad traffic.

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License to Build

Open-source licenses, by what you're building.

A free cheat sheet that maps OSS license obligations to product types — mobile, web, API, CLI — so teams know which dependencies actually create obligations.

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ProductBase

From ideas to impact, build what matters.

A home for the unstructured work that happens before you start building software: capture ideas, prioritise with RICE-style scoring, share roadmaps with stakeholders.

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Featured Case Studies

Deep dives into complex technical and leadership challenges

📌

Financing-as-a-Service Platform at topi

Context

topi enables retailers to offer flexible B2B financing at point-of-sale. At Series A, the product needed to scale fast while supporting merchant-specific business logic.

Challenge

Long onboarding cycles, hardcoded logic, poor configurability for new partners like MediaMarkt and Deutsche Telekom.

Actions

Led modular redesign of the platform. Introduced dynamic configuration engine, real-time observability, and an internal tooling layer.

Results

Reduced onboarding from 6 weeks to 1 week. Scaled to hundreds of enterprise merchants with zero downtime.

👥

Team Scaling & Culture Building

Context

As founding engineering leader at topi, I needed to scale a technical team while shipping a regulated fintech product.

Challenge

Balancing delivery speed with hiring, onboarding, and culture-building from the ground up.

Actions

Built hiring pipelines, designed career frameworks, initiated inclusive engineering rituals, and coached senior ICs into team leads.

Results

Scaled from 3 to 20+ engineers while maintaining high delivery velocity and team satisfaction.

📱

Modular Mobile Architecture for Reach PLC

Context

Reach PLC maintained a portfolio of branded news apps across the UK market.

Challenge

Duplicated code and effort across apps slowed innovation and increased maintenance burden.

Actions

Led modularization of shared components, introduced CI/CD pipelines and app theming strategy.

Results

Reduced development time by 60% and enabled rapid deployment of new branded applications.

🏦

Velo Bank Mobile Launch

Context

East West Bank wanted to expand to mobile-first banking with a modern UX for the US market.

Challenge

Greenfield development under tight timeline with US financial compliance requirements.

Actions

Led architecture design and delivered iOS/Android apps with full-stack integration and compliance framework.

Results

Successfully launched in App Store and Google Play with 4.8+ star ratings and full regulatory compliance.

Let's Connect

The fastest way to see if there is a fit is a 20-minute call. No pitch, no prep needed.