I'm Saša Tančev, founder and CTO of Smartnet Technologies, and Fractional CTO to companies that need a CTO's judgement and an engineering team that can act on it. 30+ years in software, 20+ leading engineering organisations.
Not a monthly advisory call. Accountability for the technical outcome.
Target-state architecture, decision records, environment topology, and a production-readiness roadmap that names the gaps instead of hiding them. That means monitoring, backup and recovery, rollback, and disaster recovery.
Infrastructure design, IaC, identity and access, network isolation, secret management, CI/CD, cost and scaling, from first provisioning through production operations and incident response.
OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect, RBAC and managed identities, webhook validation, auditability, and GDPR-conscious handling of clinical and customer data.
Building and running cross-functional teams across backend, web, mobile, QA and PM. Architectural standards, delivery practices, quality expectations. With or without a Smartnet team attached.
Build-versus-buy decisions across cloud, identity, real-time communications, payments, AI and mobile, judged on security, scalability, operational complexity, vendor lock-in, maintainability and total cost.
Where the hard parts live: PII anonymisation ahead of LLM processing, provider-agnostic AI layers, video and chat at scale, and controlled software delivery to fleets of devices.
I founded and lead Smartnet Technologies, a 25+ engineer nearshore company in Niš, Serbia, built entirely on referrals. 80%+ of our engineers hold MSc or BSc degrees in Computer Science. That means a roadmap I own does not have to wait for you to hire.
You can engage me with a Smartnet delivery team behind the plan, or purely as your CTO, working alongside engineers you already have. Both models are on the table, and I will tell you honestly which one your situation calls for.
My background is engineering, not management theory. I still design the architecture, review the code, own the deployment pipeline, and get the call when production breaks.
Every claim above comes from one of these. Most have a published case study.
Fractional CTO and platform architect for an industrial IoT client in Germany. Controlled software delivery to Linux and future Windows devices, built on Azure Container Apps, MySQL Flexible Server, Key Vault, Entra ID, Bicep, and an automated 14-scenario DDI acceptance suite. Proof of concept to production readiness.
Acting CTO for the platform's architecture, real-time layer and AI. Designed the GDPR-compliant reporting layer. PII anonymisation, then LLM summarisation, deliberately provider-agnostic across ChatGPT, Claude and Azure AI. Report-writing time cut by 56%.
Fractional CTO to a UK veterinary telemedicine service inside one of Europe's largest veterinary groups. Owned the end-to-end architecture and personally built and operated the full Azure estate across isolated DEV, QA, UAT and PROD. Scaled to 350,000+ pet owners and 120+ veterinary professionals at under 3% consultation failure rate.
Software development partner leading Smartnet's teams across a rolling portfolio of B2B platforms for US enterprise clients, covering quoting and pricing engines, contract management, AI-assisted support over Salesforce, Snowflake, SAP and MuleSoft, and AWS ETL pipelines.
Co-founder and CTO of a UK HR-tech startup. Architected a fully cloud-based, highly available jobs platform on Azure, with real-time notifications, background ETL workers, and integrations with the largest UK and global job portals.
Not a list of things I've read about. This is what I design, review and operate.
Typically 1–3 days per week, remote, CET. Ongoing ownership of architecture, cloud, security and the engineering practice, with or without a Smartnet delivery team.
Technical due diligence, architecture review, or a production-readiness assessment, scoped in weeks, not quarters, with a written verdict you can act on.