About the CTO role
A Chief Technology Officer (CTO) owns a company's technology vision and makes sure engineering execution serves business goals. They set the technical strategy, make or approve major architecture decisions, and build the engineering organization that ships the product. The role combines deep technical judgment with executive responsibility: budgets, hiring plans, vendor decisions, and accountability to the board for uptime, security, and delivery.
The shape of the job changes dramatically with company stage. At an early startup, the CTO often writes code, designs the first architecture, and hires the founding engineers. At a scale-up or enterprise, the role shifts toward strategy, organizational design, and managing engineering leaders. A strong CTO knows when to go deep on a technical decision and when to delegate, and can translate technology tradeoffs into language the rest of the executive team can act on.
In your posting, be explicit about the stage of your company, the size of the current engineering team, whether the CTO is expected to be hands-on with code, and who they report to. Mention the major technical challenges ahead, such as scaling, replatforming, or security certification. Candidates at this level self-select heavily based on scope and mandate, so vague postings attract the wrong applicants and repel the right ones.
CTO job description template
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Job brief
We are hiring a Chief Technology Officer to own our technology and the organization that builds it. You will set the technical direction, make or approve the decisions we will live with for years, build and lead the engineering team, and answer to the board for what we ship and how safely it runs.
This is the right seat if you know when to go deep on a decision and when to hand it over, and if you can put a technical trade-off in front of the executive team in terms they can actually decide on.
Responsibilities
- Define and communicate the company's technology vision and multi-year technical roadmap
- Make or approve major architecture, platform, and build-versus-buy decisions
- Build, lead, and scale the engineering organization, including hiring senior engineers and managers
- Align engineering priorities with product and business goals alongside the executive team
- Own security, reliability, and compliance posture across systems and infrastructure
- Manage the technology budget, cloud spend, and vendor and tooling contracts
- Establish engineering standards for code quality, delivery process, and incident response
- Evaluate emerging technologies and decide where they create real business advantage
- Represent technology to the board, investors, customers, and partners
- Develop engineering leaders and plan succession for key technical roles
Requirements and skills
- Has led engineering at the top, as a chief technology officer or head of engineering
- Has designed and scaled production systems that stayed up as they grew
- Has built engineering teams through a period of real growth
- Strong on architecture, security, and how modern software actually gets delivered
- Turns business strategy into technical priorities, and explains the trade-offs back
- Has owned budgets, vendor negotiations, and build-or-buy calls
- Communicates as convincingly with a board as with an engineer
- A technical degree, or the practical record that replaced one
Nice to have
- Experience in our industry or with a similar product and business model
- Prior experience as a founder or early technical hire at a startup
- Experience with due diligence processes for fundraising or acquisitions
- Public speaking, technical writing, or an active presence in engineering communities
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