CTO ARMY · MANAGED RETAINER

CTO Army

An AI agent team that ships, governs, and operates your technology function — for companies that don’t yet have a CTO and shouldn’t hire one.

The pitch

You don’t need to spend ₹1.2cr/year on a senior CTO who will spend 70% of their time managing other engineers. You need someone in the room when the decisions happen, with the institutional memory to make consistent calls, and the ability to ship the actual technology when ships are due. CTO Army is that — a coordinated agent system run by senior Talpro operators, with you in a single Telegram thread for weekly decisions and a monthly board-grade tech report.

Who this is for

Founder-led companies (₹5–50cr ARR) where the founder is non-technical, has 1–3 engineers shipping product, and is making CTO-grade decisions — security architecture, AI strategy, vendor selection, hiring plan, compliance posture — without a CTO in the room.

Five agents, one army

• Architect

  system design, ADRs, technology selection

  Claude Opus 4.5 + memory MCP

• Implementor

  ships features end-to-end via Claude Code

  Claude Sonnet 4.5 + project context MCP

• Sentinel

  security audits, penetration probes, dependency review

  Claude Opus 4.5 + Rakshak loop

• Compliance

  DPDPA, SOC2, ISO27001 evidence collection + auditor liaison

  Claude Sonnet 4.5 + ProveIQ

• Hiring

  JD authoring, candidate intake, interview prep, offer-letter drafting

  Claude Sonnet 4.5 + HireIQ Pro

What this replaces

Roughly cost-equivalent to one mid-senior CTO — but with 5 specialised agent roles in parallel, not one human serialising across them

CUSTOMER-ZERO PROOF

How Talpro built HireIQ Pro in 11 weeks with the CTO Army pattern

Shortlists-per-recruiter-per-week rose from 18 to 27 (+50%) on identical role mix, sustained for 9 weeks post-rollout. The 24-hour SLA hit 92% on-time across the three demanding clients (was failing at 41%). Recruiter-AI agreement on shortlists settled at 0.81. Total HireIQ Pro inference cost ran ₹14,200/month at full …

Deliverables

• 01Weekly CTO Report — written 1-pager: shipped this week, blocked, decisions needed, infra cost trend, risk register diff
• 02Monthly Tech Council — 90-min video review with founder + Talpro lead + agent surface (architecture decisions, hiring asks, vendor renewals)
• 03On-demand decision turnaround — Telegram thread, <6 business hours response on any technical question
• 04Quarterly Quality Gate score — your codebase audited against the 80-point CompetitorX gate
• 05All artefacts (ADRs, runbooks, RFCs) live in your Notion / Confluence — yours to keep at exit

Governance

• ·Founder owns every binding decision; Army recommends with rationale
• ·Every Army action logged to the customer’s memory MCP — full audit trail
• ·Founder approval required for vendor commitments >₹1L/month or hires >₹6L/year
• ·Monthly cost review with named anomalies; refund of any inference cost overrun >₹50K/month uncommitted
• ·30-day exit clause — full handoff package, ADRs, runbooks, no IP retention

4-week ramp

1. Week 0

   Onboarding call · access to your repos, infra, Notion, hiring pipeline

2. Week 1

   Audit current state · first CTO Report with the 10 most material decisions you’re behind on

3. Week 2

   Architect agent ships first ADR · Sentinel agent runs first security audit

4. Week 3

   Weekly cadence locked · Telegram decision-thread live · monthly Tech Council scheduled

5. Week 4

   First monthly Tech Council · founder declares fit / no-fit with refund offer

Out of scope

• ×Replacing senior engineering hands (Implementor agent ships, but doesn’t replace 5+ years of engineering hands)
• ×Founder-replacement (this is CTO Army, not CEO Army)
• ×Domain-specific decisions where customer expertise dominates (compliance with niche regulators, etc — Army does the legwork, founder decides)

Exit clause

30-day notice from either side. Talpro delivers a complete handoff package: every ADR, every runbook, every Notion page, every Memory MCP entry, every active deal in HubSpot. Zero IP retention. Zero non-compete on your engineers. Customer keeps the pattern; we keep the playbook.

See it before you commit.