Building products, teams,
and systems that last.
Barnett Studios is a technology consultancy founded by Lyubomir Bozhinov. Part-time technical leadership for startups and scale-ups — from first commit to stable operation.
Get in TouchWhat We Do
Fractional CTO
Strategy, hiring, architecture, delivery. Up to ten hours a week, embedded in your leadership team.
Architecture & Due Diligence
Independent technical assessment. No vendor bias, no selling you services you don't need.
AI-Native SDLC Adoption
Not “add Copilot” — a structured SDLC transformation with governance and measurable outcomes.
Engineering Hub Setup
Build a team in a new geography. From first hire to steady state.
Selected Work
Audit trail for every microsecond
Regulated FinanceBack-office control plane for a MiFID II trading platform on Aeron Cluster. Led multiple teams, owned cloud infrastructure, introduced AI-native development.
Stabilising a team that had lost trust
Workplace SafetyCTO of a safety-tech startup after two predecessors in five years. Reset the roadmap, restructured to remote-first, rebuilt the platform, reshaped company strategy.
First commit to thousands of users in six months
Online EntertainmentFounding engineer at a regulated real-money platform. Built the stack from scratch, then helped grow the engineering team from five to around fifty people.
Migrating without the big bang
Supply ChainLed a forty-person engagement replacing a legacy monolith via Strangler Fig. Built the client relationship, drove standards, handed over a maintainable architecture.
Making physical assets queryable
Telecom InfrastructureDigital twins from drone surveys — asset management, EMF simulation, and M&A due diligence for tower companies, all from a browser.
10+
Years in tech
Engineer to CTO
Every role
5 → 50
Teams scaled
Founder
Lyubomir Bozhinov — Fractional CTO. Open-source builder. More than a decade across regulated finance, safety-tech, online entertainment, and telecom — every role from software engineer to CTO. I work with founders who need that experience without the full-time overhead.
How We Work
Discovery
A short diagnostic engagement. We assess your engineering org, architecture, and team dynamics. You get a written report with recommendations — whether or not we continue working together.
Embedded Partnership
Up to ten hours per week, three to twelve months. Embedded in your leadership team — standups, hiring panels, architecture decisions. Not an advisor on the side. A working member of your team.
Transition
The goal is to make ourselves unnecessary. We hire or develop your permanent technical leadership and hand over context through a structured transition.
We Also Build
We don't just advise on systems — we build and operate them, and open-source the tools behind them.
Writing
The Code Looks Fine. That's the Problem.
AI-generated code crossed a credibility threshold. The surface gap between 'built with Claude' and 'built by a senior engineer' has nearly closed. The structural gap hasn't. Here's what that means for the CTO-founder relationship.
The API Is the Product
API design has always been product work. AI didn't change the rules — it made the cost of breaking them itemised, immediate, and often silent.
Technical Debt Is a Leadership Problem, Not an Engineering One
Ward Cunningham never said what you think he said. Technical debt is a ledger of leadership decisions — every deferred migration, every prioritised feature over refactoring, every 'we'll fix it later' that nobody scheduled. The engineers didn't create the debt. They documented it.
Speaking & Network
Upcoming:Two more talks this autumn — AI Stack Conf (building expert AI agents) and Full Stack Conf (clean code, revisited).
Part of the MISSION+ partner network — expert tech leadership and flexible development teams.
Ready to talk?
Whether you're building from zero or scaling what works, we'd like to hear about it.
Get in Touch