Fractional CTO · Technical advisor · Technical due diligence
Geotech Design is Andrew Cooper — a fractional CTO and technical advisor for deep-tech startups: scientific, simulation and high-performance software, and the hard engineering behind physical products. Four decades of getting demanding products fast, correct and shipped — including the technical work founders and their investors most need de-risked.
How I help
Senior technical judgement on the work that's expensive to get wrong — without a full-time hire. Three things I'm consistently engaged for:
Senior technical direction for a startup that can't yet justify a full-time CTO: system architecture, standards, hiring input and de-risking — deciding what to build and how, proving the uncertain parts first, and standing alongside your own engineers.
When a development has stalled, or the person who understood it has gone, I reconstruct what the system really is and does — by inference and experiment — establish the true scope, then restructure it into a foundation that can carry the product forward.
An independent read for investors and boards on whether the technology is real, the architecture sound, and the plan capable of reaching its objective — the risks named plainly, before the cheque or the pivot.
Selected work
A sample of real engagements — client details anonymised, the work and the outcomes real.
A core optimisation ran as an overnight batch and could only handle a simplified model. The bottleneck wasn't the code — it was how the problem was posed. Re-posing it so each candidate could be evaluated independently cut the cost by orders of magnitude and turned the overnight run into an interactive tool that handles the full model.
Read case study →Brought in to finish a data logger's user interface — on the understanding that the embedded software beneath it was complete. It wasn't: partial, largely untested firmware, no documentation, incomplete schematics. We reconstructed the architecture by inference and experiment, then restructured it at system level.
Read case study →A government real-time supervision system needed hundreds of Motif operator windows under heavy penalty clauses. The first took six months by hand and no second specialist could be recruited. Rather than write the second, we built a description language and generator so the client's own engineers could produce them — on time.
Read case study →Still hands-on
Alongside advising, I'm developing my own real-time instruments — a working reminder that I'm still hands-on at the bench, not only strategic. I'll showcase them here as they launch.
Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll tell you how I'd approach it.
Get in touch