Fractional CTO & CISO for startups and growth-stage companies that need to ship fast with the security and compliance maturity of a team twice their size.
You know you need SOC2 or a real security posture to close enterprise deals, but you don't have a CISO, a security team, or a plan to get there. Every deal that asks about your compliance program is a deal at risk.
Your product works, but nobody documented how or why. You're one departure away from losing critical institutional knowledge — and there's no process in place to fix it.
Your engineers are fighting their own tooling instead of building product. No CI/CD pipeline, manual deployments, no observability. And when they do use modern tools like AI coding assistants, there's no standardization or process around the output. You're shipping on a prayer and you know it won't scale.
Built the platform and engineering practices with a core team of 4 that enabled a 25-person organization to achieve: 800+ deployments per week, 95th percentile security posture, top 12% cloud maturity worldwide (DORA), 8hr RTO / 1hr RPO disaster recovery.
From zero to enterprise-grade. That's what the right leadership and infrastructure gets you.
SOC2 readiness, application security programs, security operations, and audit preparation — built from scratch or matured from where you are today. I don't write policies you'll never follow. I build programs that actually work.
CI/CD pipelines, cloud architecture, DevSecOps, observability, and modern developer workflows — including safe, effective adoption of AI engineering tools. I use proprietary tooling to generate compliance-grade documentation automatically, so nothing falls through the cracks and your team stops wasting time on docs nobody reads until audit season.
Strategic technical leadership for teams that aren't ready for a full-time executive. I embed with your team, set direction, mentor your engineers, and build the systems that scale — then hand off cleanly when you're ready. Whether you need someone to own the technical vision, stand up a security function, or professionalize your engineering org, I step in and deliver.
I don't just advise engineering teams — I build products. These are live applications I've designed, built, and shipped.
I'm Brendan Putek, founder of Leverage Works Studios. I've spent 20+ years in engineering and 10+ in leadership, building and scaling engineering organizations in regulated industries — standing up security programs, driving compliance, and making lean teams operate at enterprise scale.
I currently run security operations and handle a large portion of compliance with a single security engineer. I've built engineering platforms from scratch, mentored developers from junior to senior, and shipped products across fintech, healthtech, and defense-adjacent sectors.
I also built smoothdev.io — a tooling platform that automatically generates compliance-grade documentation from your codebase — because I got tired of watching engineering teams waste time on documentation that nobody reads until audit season.
If you're a startup advisory firm, fractional executive network, or venture studio — I'm the person you call when your clients hit an engineering or compliance wall. Your clients need technical leadership but aren't ready to hire full-time. I step in, deliver results, and your client stays happy. I work through intermediary firms regularly and I make you look good.
Grab 30 minutes and tell me what's going on. No pitch deck required.
Contact: brendan@leverageworks.studio | LinkedIn | Book a Call