Led by the person who does the work.
Cendryon is an engineering-led boutique for software companies and their investors. Every engagement is led by our founder, and we build what we recommend.
Why we exist
Most companies buy tools to fix problems that were never about tools. Most delivery time is queue time, and nobody sees it until someone measures it.
So we measure it, fix it and prove the fix. And we build the fix ourselves, with your engineers, instead of leaving you a report.
A plan nobody builds changes nothing.
Branislav (Brano) Ballay
Founder. Fractional CTO and enterprise architect.
More than 20 years across banking, the public sector and B2B software, the last ten as CTO or lead architect. Brano has led teams of more than 50 engineers, and he wrote PROVEN. He works in English, Czech and Slovak.
- 20+years in banking, the public sector and B2B software
- 50+engineers in the largest team he has led
- 10years as CTO or lead architect
Selected results
The work we are proudest of, and what it changed. Client names appear only where they are already public.
- 50% to 0%
Deployment failures, gone in 12 months
An enterprise software vendor with around 35 enterprise customers. A gated delivery process, the company’s first cloud workload on Azure and Kubernetes, and a DevOps platform that produces compliance evidence by default. Nobody left during the change.
Lead architect and fractional CTO, 2025 to now - Acquired
A platform the buyer’s due diligence singled out
A task mining startup went from yearly to monthly releases on a platform we rebuilt. The company was acquired by ServiceNow, and Brano then led the re-platforming of the product inside the acquirer.
Fractional CTO, then inside ServiceNow, 2023 to 2025 - 1st
In its market, built by a one-person engineering team
SYNAP IoT, a pharma cold-chain monitoring platform designed and built from scratch. Event-driven on Azure, with FDA-compliant reporting, live with paying customers.
CTO, 2021 to 2023 - 50+
Developers across four product teams
Development lead on a $50M program for Cemex, spanning web, mobile and custom hardware, with teams around the world.
Through NEORIS, 2016 to 2017
How we work with you
Small on purpose. Senior on every engagement.
Every engagement is led by Brano.
When the work needs a specialist, we bring in people we have worked with before. You get senior people, not a pyramid of juniors.
The method does not live in one head.
Key-person risk is something we assess in other companies, so we do not ask you to accept it in ours. PROVEN, Verdict and our tooling hold the method. The checkpoints live in your pipeline and every decision is in writing.
Prague, for the US and Europe.
Remote first, on site when it matters. Afternoons in Prague are mornings on the US East Coast, and we work in English, Czech and Slovak.
What we believe
Six rules we hold ourselves to on every engagement.
- Waiting is not working.Most delivery time is queue time, and nobody sees it until someone measures it.
- Checkpoints over tools.A tool is replaceable. A checkpoint in your pipeline is not.
- Never individuals.Person-level metrics destroy the behavior they are meant to improve. We measure the system.
- Platform over policy.A policy that no pipeline reads is not a control.
- Compliance is designed in.Or it is hell to manage. The fines are not theoretical anymore.
- Fewer things, properly.A short plan that gets built beats a long one that does not.
Talk to us.
First calls take 30 minutes. By the end of it you will know whether we are the right fit, and if we are not, we will say so.
Pick a time in your own time zone. There are slots on Prague mornings for Europe and on Prague evenings for the US.