Tristan Cartledge
Fractional CTO & AI Enablement Consultant | Founding & Principal Engineer at Speakeasy
Based in Australia · 17+ years experience
Summary
Fractional CTO and AI enablement consultant in Cairns, Australia. Founding engineer at Speakeasy, where I built the SDK generator Google uses for its GenAI SDKs.
About
I help startups and growing companies make sound technical decisions and get real value from AI, without hiring a full time CTO.
I have 17 years of engineering and technical leadership experience across developer tooling, FinTech and games. I'm a Founding and Principal Engineer at Speakeasy, where I came up with and built the OpenAPI SDK and CLI generator that became the company's core product. It's used by companies including Google, which moved its GenAI SDKs onto it, and Mistral AI. Today I build the AI developer tooling behind Speakeasy's AI Control Plane, which lets enterprises govern, secure and observe their AI agents and MCP servers. I'm also the creator of AgentLink, an open source coding agent harness for VS Code.
Before Speakeasy I was a Staff Engineer at Curve in London, leading the team that built the operations tooling for customer support, and spent over a decade in games at Splash Damage, Bossa Studios, NaturalMotion, Future Games of London (Ubisoft) and Big Ant Studios, working on titles including Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Gears of War 4, Gears Tactics and Hungry Shark. I've led teams of up to 18 engineers.
How I can help:
- Fractional CTO: technical strategy and roadmaps, architecture reviews and due diligence, hiring your first engineers, and being a trusted technical voice for founders.
- AI enablement: finding where AI actually helps, rolling out coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor with the right guardrails, and training teams to use them well.
- AI and agent engineering: building production agents, MCP servers and LLM features that are reliable, observable and secure.
I'm based in Cairns, Queensland, and work with teams across Australia and worldwide.
More about my work: https://www.tristancartledge.com
Skills
Software Architecture, Cloud & Infrastructure, M&A / Due Diligence, Platform Modernisation, Engineering Leadership, Governance & Risk, Data & AI
Regions covered
New Zealand, United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific, Australia, United States, Europe
Industry experience
Fintech, Professional Services, Retail, SaaS, Education
At a glance
Tristan brings hands-on experience across Software Architecture, Cloud & Infrastructure, M&A / Due Diligence, Platform Modernisation, Engineering Leadership, Governance & Risk and 1 other areas. Available for engagements across New Zealand, United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific, Australia, United States, Europe. Industry experience includes Fintech, Professional Services, Retail, SaaS, Education.
How fractional CTO engagements with Tristan work
Tristan works on a fractional basis — typically one to three days a week for an agreed engagement length — so you get senior technical leadership without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. Engagements commonly include technical due diligence, board reporting, engineering team leadership, technology strategy, architecture reviews, hiring support, and stepping in as interim CTO during a transition.