Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership and roadmap ownership at a fraction of an executive hire — measured in shipped milestones and avoided rewrites.
retainer · strategy → executionFractional CTO · Principal SRE · Systems Architect · AI Systems
Systems that hold.
Fractional CTO and principal-level reliability consulting for organizations that can't afford to guess about technology — with 25+ years of building, from the first in-dash car computer to today's AI-native, agent-operated infrastructure.
why now
The agentic era arrived faster than your org chart.
Enterprise AI-agent adoption jumped from 11% to 42% of organizations in two quarters — but almost nobody can govern what they deployed. The gap between an agent pilot and a production system you can trust is exactly where I work.
11% → 42%
of enterprises running AI agents, in just two quarters
96% / 12%
of orgs run agents vs. those who can actually govern them
400M+
monthly MCP SDK downloads — the universal agent protocol
Aug 2026
EU AI Act high-risk obligations now binding; the regulatory wave is here
services
Productized engagements, principal-level judgment.
I don't recommend architectures — I operate them. Every offering below is a pattern running in my own production infrastructure before it's ever proposed to a client.
Leadership & Reliability core practice
Senior technical leadership and production-grade reliability — the foundation everything else stands on.
Reliability & SRE Engagement
SLOs, incident response, observability, and capacity engineering that convert outages into single-digit-minute non-events.
production readiness · on-call sanityArchitecture Review
A principal-level teardown of your stack — integrations, data flows, failure modes — with a sequenced remediation plan you can execute without me.
fixed scope · 2–3 weeksAI-Native Operations core practice
Make AI carry real operational load — visible, governed, and paying for itself.
AI-Native Ops Buildout
LLM-driven runbooks, automation, and agent-assisted incident response that cut toil hours so your engineers ship instead of babysit.
I run my company this wayLLM Observability & Cost Control
Tracing, evals, and priority-aware model routing so every AI dollar and every hallucination is visible — engagements in this space routinely halve LLM API spend.
langfuse-grade tracing · routingSelf-Hosted & Private AI Stacks
Open-weight frontier-class models on your own hardware for privacy-bound and data-sovereign organizations — law firms, non-profits, institutions.
on-prem proven · sovereignty firstThe Agentic Frontier few can offer this
Offerings built on infrastructure I already run in production — signed agent identity, MCP servers behind CDN and WAF, multi-agent meshes with human-in-the-loop gates. Most consultancies talk about this layer; I ship it.
Agent Governance Readiness Audit
A named audit of your agent fleet: identity, cost ceilings, kill switches, human-in-the-loop gates, observability, and incident response — before an autonomous agent bankrupts a budget or walks past a control.
96% run agents · 12% can govern themVerified Agent Identity & Provenance
Cryptographically signed, third-party-verifiable identity for humans and AI agents: did:web, verifiable credentials, RFC 9421 signed responses, DNS verification. Live in my production today.
rfc 9421 · did:web · running nowMCP Enterprise Enablement
Design, build, and migrate Model Context Protocol servers — including migration sprints to the 2026 stateless/serverless spec with OAuth hardening. I operate production MCP endpoints daily.
mcp.username.md · lambda + wafAgentic-Web Discoverability & AEO
Fixed-scope Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) package that makes your business legible to AI agents and answer engines: llms.txt, MCP discovery manifests, agents.md, AI catalogs, and schema.org — so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and the agents they power find, cite, and transact with you first.
fixed scope · this site runs itAI Compliance Readiness
Technical readiness for the regulatory wave — EU AI Act, agent-conduct rules, audit trails, and documentation pipelines — built alongside your counsel. Not legal advice; the engineering that makes counsel's advice real.
works with your law firmAI Security & Attack-Surface Audit
Agent kill-switch and cost-ceiling review, model-distillation defense, and AI-assistant attack-surface hardening — from a practitioner with a bug-bounty pedigree.
assume agents will be exploitedproof, not slideware
You get patterns proven in my production.
My own holding company runs AI-native. These aren't case studies borrowed from a vendor deck — they're systems I operate, page for, and answer to.
agent-mesh / NATS
Multi-agent orchestration on a NATS event bus with human-in-the-loop approval gates and PagerDuty escalation.
mcp.username.md
Production MCP server on Lambda + API Gateway + CloudFront + WAF, serving agent handshakes publicly.
signed identity
RFC 9421 signed HTTP responses, did:web, verifiable credentials, and DNS-verified profiles — live on the username.md platform.
llm observability
Langfuse tracing, evals, and cost telemetry across every agent and automation in the fleet.
ai-native SRE
Claude-driven runbooks, log watchers, auto-remediation drafts, and nightly audits keeping a 16-stack fleet honest.
since 1999
Prototyped the world's first in-dash automotive infotainment system — Slashdot-featured, printed in technology books.
about
Principal-level judgment. Founder-level urgency.
I'm Chris Bergeron — serial founder, Fractional CTO, Principal Site Reliability Engineer, and Systems Architect. Systems integrator for recreation. I've spent 25+ years across the whole stack of a technology career: help desk, networking, systems administration, consulting, and principal-level SRE.
I've served the International Monetary Fund, law firms, non-profits, and grocery & manufacturing organizations. I've worked inside large corporations and mom-and-pop shops, and I speak both languages: governance and risk for the boardroom, terminals and trade-offs for the engineers.
Today I run The Holding Company as a fully AI-native operation — agents in production, signed machine identity, self-hosted AI infrastructure. When I advise on the agentic era, it's from operational evidence, not analyst reports.
- 1999Prototyped the world's first in-dash automotive infotainment system (DashPC) — Slashdot-featured
- 2001Founded Dashwerks, Inc. — early automotive computing
- 2000s–2020sConsulting & Principal SRE across institutions, corporations, and small business
- 2024+Built The Holding Company as an AI-native operation — agent meshes, MCP servers, LLM observability
- nowAgentic-web identity (username.md, about-me.md, finger.md) and AI consulting
how we work
Three ways to engage.
Audit
Fixed-scope, fixed-price teardown — architecture, reliability, agent governance, or AI security — ending in a sequenced plan you own.
2–3 weeks · report + working sessionSprint
A focused build: an MCP migration, an observability stack, a discoverability package, a compliance-documentation pipeline. Shipped, not advised.
2–6 weeks · working softwareRetainer
Fractional CTO or standing SRE counsel — a principal on your side of the table for roadmaps, hires, vendors, and incidents.
monthly · limited seatsLet's find out where your systems don't hold.
One working session. Bring your architecture, your agent pilot, or your incident history — leave with a straight assessment and a sequenced next step.
consult@chrisbergeron.com