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Fractional CTO Services:
Advising, Application Development, and Maintenance

Forensis Group
Circinaut has seen us through a complete technology and design overhaul of our web presence, including some very challenging times in the process. I sleep better at night knowing Rian's on our team.
Get in touch!

Hi. I'm Rian Schmidt.

My expertise is backed by years of leadership roles at large and small companies, an MBA from Stanford, an engineering degree from the University of Minnesota, and a CISSP certification.
Portland, Oregon is where I call home. It's just me, my family, two dogs, a bunch of chickens, and a jar of kombucha. Classic Portland.

My Latest Blog Article:

Keycloak 26 on Kubernetes: Mixed Content Error

Circinaut's Unique Value Proposition

Rather than spending months trying to hire a full-time CTO that you may not need, rolling the dice with a faceless shop that'll hand you off to junior staff, or cobbling together a rag-tag crew of cheap freelancers from Fiverr, you can hire me to provide you with high-end, immediate, flexible technical expertise. I have decades of experience, a Stanford MBA, and a CISSP certification.
I keep my pricing reasonable by working directly with my clients, without the overhead of a large consulting firm that provides little additional value but costs plenty-- often twice as much.
That means you get back to working on your business sooner with less risk, and add a serious, proven technology partner to your team.
Circinaut is a Fractional CTO Services provider that allows you to focus on your business while leaving the technology stack to me. I'm based in Portland, Oregon, but I work with clients all across the country.

Fractional CTO / Advising

Whether it's getting a start on how you might turn your idea into reality or acting as a check on your ongoing development process, I provide hourly or retainer-based technical consulting services-- serving on advisory boards, providing technical due diligence, and helping small companies navigate the technical landscape.
My relationships with my clients are typically long-term and based on trust and clear communication.

Sample Engagements

Contract CTO for an immigration law firm to completely redesign a travel assessment application from its unmanageable prototype to a modern, API-driven web and mobile application, work with clients, and manage staff.
Retained relationship with a legal industry marketing team to monitor results, enhance applications, and act as the technology checkpoint for 3rd party relationships.
Advisor to multiple start-ups on assessing technology options and vetting technical resources.

Application Development

Data-driven, cloud-native web application development. Machine learning and artificial intelligence. Today, there are an overwhelming number of options, platforms, and frameworks. I will help you navigate the options and architect and build a custom solution that fits your specific business needs. I can then help you deploy and maintain it, or hand it off to your team.

Sample Engagements

Develop a corporate Slack chatbot to utilize Generative AI to efficiently provide information to employees, saving hours of accumlated time answering questions and performing common tasks.
Creation (and hosting and maintenance) of a custom, AI-driven gardening plan generator for a fine gardening consultant. The system uses a custom AI model to generate a gardening plan based on a client's preferences and the consultant's expertise.

Application Maintenance

An often-underestimated challenge is maintaining and enhancing your applications. Regular maintenance and updates are critical to keeping your applications secure and running smoothly. I can help you understand your current technology stack, and then work with you to develop a plan to keep it operating at peak security and effectiveness-- through the use of cloud and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

Sample Engagements

Long-term application management for a financial services marketing team to design, host, and manage a dynamic, CMS-based questionnaire for their clients to aid in assessing and improving their business practices. The system calculates industry benchmarks and scores while allowing for the client to adjust questions and weightings over time.
Development, hosting, and management of a large, complex, SEO-optimized Next.js Web site and the constituent CMS and database components.
 
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Circinaut is generally proudly based in Portland, Oregon. Sometimes, this place, though. I can't even.