I’m Mike Kitanoski — a Fractional & Interim CTO, technology executive, and hands-on engineer with more than 20 years of experience designing, building, scaling, and stabilizing complex software and infrastructure systems.
I work with founders, CEOs, and leadership teams who need experienced technical leadership, especially during periods of growth, transition, or increased complexity — when decisions matter and mistakes are expensive.
My background spans software engineering, system architecture, cloud infrastructure, and executive leadership, with a strong focus on aligning technology with real business outcomes.
I’ve founded and led multiple technology organizations, scaling teams and operations from early-stage execution to multi-million-dollar outcomes, including a successful acquisition by a public company.
As Founder and Principal Consultant at SoftwareWorks, I’ve led strategic consulting engagements across industries, helping organizations:
I also led the full internal processes required for ISO 9001:2015 (Quality Management) and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 (Information Security) certification — not as a checkbox exercise, but as part of building mature, reliable, and auditable engineering operations.
I regularly act as a Fractional or Interim CTO for early-stage, growth-stage, and mid-market companies, and in these roles, I typically support:
I’m comfortable operating at both strategic and deeply technical levels — from board discussions to architecture reviews to hands-on problem-solving when needed.
Earlier in my career, I served as Director of Software Engineering at Monet Software, where I founded and scaled an R&D organization to over 45 engineers across Software Development, QA, DevOps, BI, and Support.
This organization played a central role in generating $5M+ in product revenue and ultimately supported Monet’s successful acquisition by Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT), where I later led post-acquisition integration and cloud delivery initiatives across a 50+ engineer organization.
These experiences shaped how I think about:
My career began well below the application layer.
I’ve worked extensively with GNU/Linux, UNIX, Solaris, and BSD systems, designing and operating high-performance, high-availability environments long before “cloud-native” became a term.
I bring formal training and certification across systems engineering, networking, and information security, including:
Alongside 25+ professional certifications in networking, datacenter systems, and telecom infrastructure from Nokia and Sun Microsystems, and over 30+ professional certifications in GSM, LTE, IP/MPLS, VoIP, and OSS/BSS from Motorola Technical University.
This background allows me to reason about systems end-to-end — from hardware and operating systems to distributed applications, cloud platforms, and CI/CD pipelines.
Over the years, I’ve designed, developed, and maintained systems for reliability-critical domains, distributed and high-performance environments for cloud and containerized platforms in various technology stacks including C, C++, Java, Rust, and C#/.NET, with modern cloud-native tooling such as Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and Linux-based environments.
This hands-on foundation ensures that my architectural and strategic decisions are backed with practical engineering reality, not only theory.
Some engagements are short and focused; others evolve into longer-term partnerships. In all cases, my objective is the same: reduce risk, improve execution, and leave the organization stronger than I found it.
I hold a Dipl.-Ing. EE (MSc equivalent) in Computer Engineering, Informatics, and Automation from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
I believe effective technology leadership is:
I don’t sell hype. I help organizations make sound decisions — and execute on them.
Whether I’m engaged as a Fractional CTO, Interim CTO, or principal engineering partner, my goal is never dependency, but the opposite — it's to create: