The CTO you're hiring.
I'm Tareq Mahmud. I've been writing software for thirty years — AS/400 COBOL in the nineties, osCommerce and Magento through the 2000s, .NET and AI-first development today. Self-taught, all of it. I see patterns where others see chaos, and I've built a career on being the person who gets called when the pattern matters.
Fowara LLC is my Fractional CTO practice: I embed as the technology leader for B2B e-commerce companies, on a monthly retainer, with a dedicated engineering team behind me. Since 2009 that's meant 100+ delivered projects — and client relationships that run seven, ten, fourteen years.
Some say debugging code isn't a CTO's job. I disagree. Judgment without hands is just opinion.
How I run engagements
Every Fowara engagement runs on three things you can inspect.
Playbooks
The work is broken into named playbooks — platform assessment, data migration, security hardening, schema implementation — each with a defined output, timeline, and published price. Proposals list the exact playbooks we'll run. You always know what you're paying for.
Rules
Every build follows a written engineering constitution — twenty-three rules, no exceptions. Audit logging on every entity. Soft deletes everywhere. No hardcoded secrets, ever. Accessibility from the first commit. It's why four people can run infrastructure most agencies would staff with twenty.
Fallbacks
Anything AI-assisted has a documented path for when the AI is down, and a manual procedure for when everything is down. Workflow-first, AI-assisted, manually recoverable. Your operation never depends on a model being awake.
One accountable leader. A team behind him.
Behind every engagement is a distributed team of 7–12 specialists across the US, Europe, and South Asia — senior engineers, DevOps, security review, and QA. Every engagement is led directly by me. You get one person to call, one person accountable, and a team that makes the work ship. You never manage my team; that's my job.
Built to a standard most vendors don't publish
Code moves from a secured machine directly to Azure through Entra ID — no shared CI runners, no third-party build actions, no secrets in any repository. The pipeline meets SLSA Level 3. Every entity carries an audit trail. Pricing is published at fowara.com/pricing because trust shouldn't require a discovery call.
Our clients stay.
| Client | Relationship | Industry |
|---|---|---|
| Zenzii ACTIVE | 14 years · 2012–present | Wholesale jewelry |
| MedSupply Partners ACTIVE | 7 years · 2019–present | Medical supply distribution |
| Baby Braithwaite | 10 years · 2012–2022 | Maternity retail |
| Mercy Robes | 7 years · 2015–2022 · 1,200% growth | Clergy attire |
| CoffeeAM | 3 years · 2017–2020 | Specialty coffee |
| NCR Corporation | 3 years · 2012–2015 | Enterprise integration |
“Essential to our success.”
— Co-founder, Zenzii · 14-year relationship
1,200% growth over seven years — one embedded technology leader, one retainer.
— Mercy Robes · 2015–2022
What makes this different
We build, we don't just advise.
Recommendations come with commits. If I propose an architecture, I'm prepared to implement it — and often do.
Engineers who use AI, not prompt engineers.
AI has made me faster; it hasn't replaced thirty years of judgment about what should be built. Every AI-assisted system we ship has a documented non-AI fallback.
I go where the problem is.
Platform, integration, security, data, search visibility — the value of a CTO is not staying in a lane. When the problem crosses domains, so do I.
We don't push what you don't need.
I've told prospects not to hire me. I've talked clients out of replatforming. The fourteen-year relationships come from exactly that.
FAQ
Who owns the code you build?
What does a fractional CTO cost?
Do you replace our developers or agency?
Talk to the person you'd actually be hiring.
One hour, free, no pitch. I'll look at your stack before the call and bring three specific observations. If we're not a fit, you'll leave with the observations anyway.
Schedule your free consultation