Fractional CTO and hands-on engineer for hardware companies.

Board to cloud, prototype to production. I've led engineering as interim CTO and CISO, built the autonomy stack for a Lockheed Martin–backed drone racing program, and taken medical device software through HIPAA and SOC 2. I'm a named inventor on multiple patents, and I still write code every week.

Interim CTO · Interim CISO · Hardware design · Embedded Linux & RTOS · Secure boot & TEE · AWS IoT · SOC 2 / HIPAA

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Services

Fractional CTO / CISO

Technical leadership for founders and boards who need a senior operator now, not a six-month executive search. I do this now for med-tech as interim CTO, have served as interim CISO for a smart commercial kitchen appliance company, and have held director-level roles in other industries.

  • Architecture and technical roadmap you can put in front of investors
  • Hiring, vendor, and build-vs-buy decisions
  • Cloud cost and infrastructure strategy
  • Security and compliance programs - SOC 2, HIPAA, customer security reviews
  • Hardware and firmware programs included - I've served as head of hardware, head of software and can direct full product engineering from schematic capture through to deployment.
  • Hands-on when it counts: I'll review the code, sit in the design review, and take the escalation call

Retainer-based, one or two days a week, three-month minimum.

Talk about a retainer

Product Engineering — hardware, firmware, cloud

Design and delivery for connected hardware. Most shops don't do all of this, I own the entire process and have been hands-on in every role, from architecture through to figuring out why capacitor C21 keeps blowing up.

  • Hardware architecture and schematic design - processor and component selection, power, connectivity, and DFM decisions, with layout handled by partners I've worked with for years
  • Embedded Linux, RTOS, board bring-up, drivers
  • Edge compute and autonomy on NVIDIA platforms
  • Secure boot, trusted execution (OP-TEE), device identity and provisioning
  • AWS IoT, fleet management, backend services
  • Control interfaces and operator UIs

Hourly or fixed-scope. For larger builds I scale with a long-standing engineering partner team under my direction.

Scope a project

Selected Work

Drone Racing League — AIRR / AlphaPilot

Companion computer and autonomy stack

Designed the companion computer and autonomy software for DRL's AIRR program with Lockheed Martin - an autonomous drone racing series where teams' AI flew identical hardware at full speed through unmodified courses.

Developed on the NVIDIA Xavier platform, when it was still new. Fixed NVIDIA's rt-kernel patches for NVIDIA and made Linux sing as an RTOS suitable for perception and control.

Named inventor on two granted patents and a published application from this work:

Granted

Published

AutonomyNVIDIA JetsonReal-time systemsHardware integration

Kitchen Brains — Interim CISO

Device security platform, provisioning through deployment

Served as interim CISO and built the security platform protecting Kitchen Brains' commercial kitchen controllers. OP-TEE trusted execution to protect firmware and keys on the device, a secure provisioning pipeline, and an Azure backend for fleet management; so the code and credentials on every unit are protected from the factory floor to the customer's kitchen. Helped them scale from provisioning and managing 10 devices a month to 1000 a week.

Security leadershipOP-TEESecure provisioningAzure IoT

IDK America — IP NINJAR

Control interface for a professional AV-over-IP platform

Developed the control interface for IDK's IP NINJAR product line; the software integrators and operators use to configure and run large AV-over-IP installations. Shipping product which has been on the market for years, real users, and a good example of taking a system from the network layer up to the screen.

Control systemsUINetworked devices

GreenSight Agronomics — Aerospace SDR

Software-defined radio for an avionics program

Supported GreenSight's software-defined radio system for an aerospace customer's onboard radio replacement program.

SDRAvionicsEmbedded systems

Medical device company — Interim CTO

Interim CTO for a medical device company building patient progress tracking. Designed the device hardware and owned the firmware, cloud infrastructure, and the HIPAA and SOC 2 programs.

Named inventor on a related published patent application.

Technical leadershipHardware designHIPAASOC 2Regulated devices

Also worked with

Performance Drone Works · Ventus Networks

What clients say

Jordan is an innovative engineer who productively delivers results that drive project success. His engineering cornerstones are attention to detail and quality. In our project he stepped outside his assignment and recognized larger issues, addressed them and went beyond any expectation and built a simulation suite for test and verification. The result was an efficient and resilient solution. And he is easy to work with.
Scott Rafferty, VP OperationsE-Space · earth horizon sensor
An absolutely brilliant mind who can clearly communicate with you, thinks outside the box, and is always helping evolve the project to bring it to success. Beyond knowledgeable in his specific domains but also widely knowledgeable in other domains. HIGHLY recommend. Jordan and I will be working together for a long time.
Anthony DiPrizio, CEOTriple2 Digital

How I Work

AI-accelerated, security-first.

I use AI coding agents. It's why a one-person firm can ship at the pace of a team. But I run them differently than most. Every client lives in its own isolated Qubes environment: separate VMs for code, credentials, and tooling, with nothing shared across projects and nothing leaking into third-party services. Your source and your secrets stay in a compartment built for them. I would love to nerd-out and explain this workflow on a short intro call.

Where it matters, I write and understand the code - I've been programming since I was a kid, for over 30 years now, in languages such as C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript, Bash, PowerShell, even MIPS and x86 assembly, and certainly others I've forgotten.

One accountable engineer, with capacity when it's needed.

Every engagement is led by me. Architecture, key decisions, the code that matters. For larger builds I scale with an engineering partner team I've worked with for years for application layers, and a PCB layout partner for board design. Both are under my direction and my review, with access scoped to their piece of the work. I own the architecture, the schematic, and the bring-up.

How engagements run.

Clear scope up front, a written plan you can share with your board, regular demos over status reports, and code that's documented well enough that you're never dependent on me.

Industries

Drones and aerospace · Industrial and manufacturing IoT · Medical devices · Connected consumer hardware · Networked infrastructure

About

I'm Jordan Restifo. I started Bodangly Software in 2015 to build embedded Linux devices, after several years as a senior engineer at Ventus Networks working on enterprise network infrastructure. Since then the work has grown up the stack and into the leadership chair: interim CTO and CISO roles, compliance programs, and a portfolio that runs from drone autonomy to avionics radios to medical devices.

I'm US-based and work remotely on Eastern time.

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