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Jake Bowles

Fractional CTO for UK organisations.

A fractional CTO puts a Chief Technology Officer in your leadership team for part of the week instead of a full-time hire: someone who owns technology direction, sits with the board and leads the engineering team from the first week, without the cost, the recruitment fee or the six-month search. The point is not cover. It is momentum: decisions the organisation has been circling get made, and the capability to keep making them stays with you.

Book the first conversationRead the record

When a fractional CTO fits

  • You have a technology function but no one senior enough to own its direction, and the board wants answers about AI, cloud and delivery it can trust.
  • You are a founder or COO holding the CTO seat yourself and need a practitioner to take it, part-time, until the business justifies a full-time hire.
  • You have a full-time CTO and need a peer for a defined problem: an AI operating model, a sovereign cloud estate, or an engineering team learning to build with agents.

What I do in your week

  • Board and leadership: technology strategy, an AI operating model the board can govern, honest vendor scrutiny, and plain-English answers to questions about risk, data and sovereignty.
  • Engineering: architecture and governance for agents in production, plan-first and review-gated development with coding agents, and the guardrails, tests and measurement that make either defensible.
  • Infrastructure: sovereign and hybrid Azure estates for UK regulated and public-sector organisations, keeping data, models and operations under UK control without giving up capability.

How an engagement works

  • A fixed share of the week, agreed up front, usually one or two days. Most of my week belongs to Synapx, where I am Chief Technology Officer; the highlighted days on this site are yours.
  • Engagements start with a first conversation about the problem, not a proposal. If I am not the right person I will say so and point you to who is.
  • I stay hands-on. I read the code, sit in the engineering room and present to the board myself; nothing is delegated to a bench.

Where the return comes from

A fractional CTO is not a cheaper CTO. It is a different shape of one: senior judgement applied at the moments that move the business, without carrying a full package for the hours in between. The return shows up in four places, and we agree in the first month how each will be measured.

  1. One salary line becomes a share

    You pay for one or two days of a CTO, not a full-time package, a recruiter’s fee and the months a search takes. The role is filled the week we agree it.

  2. Decisions stop circling

    AI, cloud and vendor questions that have sat on the board agenda for a quarter get an accountable answer in the week they are raised, from someone who has made them before and will stand behind them.

  3. The organisation moves faster than the market around it

    Agents in production, engineers building with agents, and a sovereign estate that regulators accept are the three shifts every UK organisation now has to make. You make them with someone who has already done each one, so you skip the expensive first attempt.

  4. Capability stays when the engagement ends

    The operating model, the guardrails and the engineering practices are built into your teams, not rented from a bench. What you keep is a leadership team that can govern AI and an engineering function that ships with it.

Measured, not assumed. In the first month we write down what the return should look like for you: decisions closed, cost avoided, delivery cycle time, risk retired, capability built. Then we report against it, every month, in one page.

Track record

Nine years of building and leading on Azure for UK organisations, the last three at the front of the agentic era. Every line below is verifiable on LinkedIn or on this site.

  1. 2025 – now

    Chief Technology Officer, Synapx. Set technical strategy across the data, cloud and AI practices and introduced agentic development across engineering. Speaker at Synapx’s AI in Action.

  2. 2022 – 2025

    Principal Consultant and Data & AI Practice Lead, Expert Thinking. Built and led the Data and AI practice, developed the company’s internal AI tooling, and delivered a globally resilient cloud platform for an industry-leading UK company.

  3. 2023 and 2024

    BCS IT Awards, Rising Star of the Year finalist two years running: the UK’s chartered institute for IT recognising the work, not the title.

  4. 2021 – 2022

    Azure SME at Pax8 for the whole UK company; then Terraform and Azure DevOps delivery for a large enterprise at Contino.

  5. 2017 – 2021

    CGI, on a degree apprenticeship: from test analyst on a safety-critical Defence application to Junior Azure Architect on a large-scale Azure migration, alongside a first-class degree.

  6. Credentials

    Microsoft AZ-400 DevOps, Azure Solutions Architect, Azure Administrator, Azure Fundamentals; SAFe 4 Practitioner.

  7. 2026

    This site: designed and built with coding agents, including a working agent that plans, calls tools and renders answers. The practice, demonstrated.

Questions a board asks first

What is a fractional CTO?
A Chief Technology Officer engaged for a fraction of the working week, typically one to three days, rather than as a full-time employee. They own technology direction, represent technology to the board and lead the engineering function for the time they are engaged.
How is a fractional CTO different from an interim CTO or a consultant?
An interim CTO is full-time for a limited period, usually covering a gap. A consultant advises and leaves. A fractional CTO is part-time and ongoing, and holds the seat: accountable for decisions, not just recommendations.
Which organisations do you work with?
UK organisations, often in regulated or public sectors, that need senior technology leadership around AI, cloud and delivery. I take on a small number at a time.
Are you still a practising CTO?
Yes. I am Chief Technology Officer at Synapx, a UK data and AI consultancy, and lead its engineering day to day. The fractional work is the same job, for part of your week.
What does it cost?
It depends on the share of the week and the term. Book a first conversation and I will give you a straight answer.

Nine years, one chart

Every employer since 2017, the awards and credentials along the way, and the line where the agentic era began. The full record is on the CV.

ChatGPT is released · Nov 2022
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  1. CGI

  2. Pax8

  3. Contino

  4. Expert Thinking

  5. Synapx

  6. Milestones
Current role Past role The agentic era, from Nov 2022 Award Talk Certification

Junior Azure Architect at CGI, Sep 2017 to Jul 2021. Azure SME at Pax8, Jun 2021 to Jun 2022. Consultant at Contino, Jun 2022 to Nov 2022. Principal Consultant, Data & AI Practice Lead at Expert Thinking, Nov 2022 to Oct 2025. Chief Technology Officer at Synapx, Sep 2025 to now. ChatGPT is released, Nov 2022. SAFe 4 Practitioner, Jun 2019. Azure Fundamentals, Jun 2020. Azure Administrator Associate, Jun 2021. Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions (AZ-400), Jun 2022. Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions, Jun 2022. BCS IT Awards · Rising Star of the Year, finalist, Nov 2023. BCS IT Awards · Rising Star of the Year, finalist, Nov 2024. Synapx AI in Action, Nov 2025.