CTO / VP Engineering

Also known as: Chief Technology Officer, Head of Engineering, Engineering Director, SVP Engineering, Fractional CTO, Interim CTO, Founding CTO.

What does a CTO / VP Engineering do?

A CTO / VP Engineering is the leader responsible for what the company builds its product on and how, and for the engineering team that does it. At an early stage the CTO is the strongest engineer and architect; later the job is building the team, hiring and delivery processes. Many companies need one of these, not both.

• chooses the architecture, stack and platform and owns technical debt;
• builds the engineering organisation: structure, levels, hiring, team leads;
• sets up delivery: planning, releases, quality, incidents;
• turns product plans into realistic timelines and resources;
• represents technology to the CEO, the board and investors, including in due diligence.

When does a company need a CTO / VP Engineering?

A company needs a CTO / VP Engineering when engineering becomes the bottleneck for the business: releases slip, the team grows faster than its processes, or technical choices start to limit the product. The first CTO is usually hired when a startup moves from an MVP to a product that has to scale. A VP Engineering comes later, when there are several dozen engineers and a founder-CTO needs someone for people and delivery. Another trigger is a platform change or a round where investors will scrutinise the technology. If the job is one strong person who writes the code and ships the MVP, you do not need a leader yet: hire a Founding Engineer.

CTO vs VP Engineering: what's the difference?

A CTO owns technology decisions, while a VP Engineering owns people and delivery. The CTO decides what to build on and where the architecture goes; the VP Engineering makes sure the team ships on time and at the right quality. In small companies this is one person; in larger ones it is two roles, with the CTO often the external face of technology and the VP Engineering the internal manager. Both differ from a CIO by focus: the product the company sells, not internal systems.

CTO / VP Engineering vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a CTO / VP Engineering?

Hiring a CTO / VP Engineering is hard because the right profile is defined by the company's stage, not by the title, and stage is barely visible in a CV.

• The same title means very different jobs: the CTO of a ten-person startup and the CTO of a company with hundreds of engineers do different work.
• A strong tech lead is not automatically a CTO, and a CTO from a large company does not always want, or know how, to build from scratch.
• Companies often want an architect and a people manager in one person and rarely agree on which matters more.
• Candidates who have already led a team through similar growth are usually busy and choose whom they talk to.

What to decide before hiring a CTO / VP Engineering?

• What must engineering deliver in the next 18 months? This decides whether you need a builder from scratch, a scaler or a turnaround leader.
• Do you need an architect, a people manager or both? If you do not decide upfront, interviewers compare candidates with different strengths and no shared criterion.
• How large will the team be in a year? A CTO comfortable with 15 engineers may struggle with 150, and the other way round.
• Is a founder-CTO staying in the company? If so, agree on who makes technology decisions, or the new leader will leave.

Where to find a CTO / VP Engineering?

CTOs and VPs Engineering usually come from product companies that have already gone through your stage of growth: heads of engineering and engineering directors who scaled a team, and startup CTOs after an exit or a shutdown. For international companies, a strong pool is Russian-speaking and Eastern European CTOs and VPs Engineering across Europe and the Middle East. A strong candidate has grown a team several times over while keeping release speed; another signal is architectural decisions they can explain with load and cost numbers. NEWHR searches for these candidates by the results of their work, not by applications to a job post.

How to assess a CTO / VP Engineering in an interview?

A CTO / VP Engineering is assessed through a walkthrough of the teams and systems they built and an architecture session on your product. The walkthrough covers team size and structure, hiring, incidents and the decisions they would now reverse. The CEO, the founders and, where there are any, senior engineers take part on the company side; references come from engineers who reported to the candidate.

Strong signals:

• explains technical decisions through their cost to the business;
• talks about hiring failures and how they fixed them;
• asks about the current team and debt before proposing changes.

Red flags:

• talks only about technology and never about people or timelines;
• proposes rewriting everything before seeing the code;
• cannot name the metrics they used to judge their team.

How long does it take to hire a CTO / VP Engineering?

We present the first candidates for the CTO / VP Engineering role within 5–7 days of the brief. The whole search usually takes one to six months.

Related roles

• CTPO — owns both technology and product in one role.
• Chief Architect — owns the architecture, but not the team or hiring.
• CIO — runs the company's internal systems, not the product.
• Founding Engineer — the first engineer in a startup who writes the code; often a future CTO.
• CPO — decides what to build; the CTO decides how.