Technical leadership
Fractional cloud architect and technical lead
Senior AWS and Azure engineering embedded with your team for a day or two a week, without a permanent hire. You get the architecture decisions, the platform work and the mentoring of a technical lead who has run these platforms at scale.
Who it is for
- This is for CTOs, heads of engineering and founders who have a platform to build or fix and no senior cloud engineer to lead it. It suits regulated businesses, including financial services, that need someone who has worked inside a bank's controls and not only read about them. It also suits startups that want a fractional CTO's technical judgement without the title.
What the work covers
- Architecture and design decisions for AWS and Azure, recorded so that the team can defend them later.
- Landing zones, accounts and subscriptions, networking, service control policies, KMS and AWS Config, delivered as Terraform.
- Identity programs on Microsoft Entra ID, Amazon Cognito and AWS IAM Identity Center, including single sign-on, conditional access and phishing-resistant MFA.
- PKI, certificate lifecycle and TLS hygiene.
- Observability with Prometheus and Grafana, and the on-call practice that goes with it.
- Build versus buy decisions, vendor and tooling selection, and hiring support for the permanent role.
- Mentoring for the engineers who will own the platform afterwards.
What you get
- A named senior engineer on a regular schedule, with priority response between days.
- Decisions and designs written down in your repositories and wikis, not in a consultant's deck.
- Working infrastructure as code, reviewed and merged through your own pipelines.
- A monthly summary of what changed, what is at risk and what comes next.
- A handover plan from the first week, because the aim is a team that no longer needs the engagement.
How it runs
- Engagements run as a set number of hours each month or as a regular day or two a week, with a three month minimum for embedded work. Work is remote by default, with on-site days in Sydney when they help.
- Access is through your own identity provider and your own repositories, and nothing is held outside your tenancy.
Who does the work
Thomas Hamer leads the engagement personally. He has led cloud identity, networking and observability platforms inside one of Australia's largest banks, and has built and operated production AWS, Azure and PKI systems for government and defence. More at hamer.cloud.
Common questions
What is a fractional cloud architect?
A fractional cloud architect is a senior cloud engineer who works for your organisation on a part-time, ongoing basis, usually one or two days a week, and takes ownership of architecture and platform decisions in that time. It gives a smaller team access to senior judgement without the cost or the hiring lead time of a permanent architect.
How is this different from a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO works on technology strategy, hiring and the board relationship. A fractional cloud architect works on the platform itself. Hamer Technical can cover both for a small company, and for a larger one the engagement stays close to the engineering.
Do you work inside regulated environments?
Yes. The founder has worked inside financial services change control, access governance and audit, and Hamer Technical is a member of the Defence Industry Security Program (DISP).