What Is a CTO? Role, Responsibilities, and When You Need One

A CTO, or chief technology officer, is the executive responsible for a company's technology strategy: the architecture decisions, the build-versus-buy calls, and the engineering direction that turns a business goal into a working system. The title exists at nearly every company that ships software, but what the job actually covers varies a lot by stage.

## What a CTO actually does

Strip away the title and a CTO's job comes down to five things.

**Technology strategy.** Deciding what to build, in what order, and on what stack, so engineering work maps to what the business needs in the next quarter and the next two years, not just the current sprint.

**Architecture ownership.** The system design that everything else sits on top of: how data flows, how services talk to each other, what breaks first under load, and what it costs to change later.

**Vendor and build decisions.** Whether to write something in-house, buy a SaaS tool, or hire an agency, and how to walk that decision back if it turns out wrong.

**Engineering leadership.** Setting technical standards, code review practices, and hiring bar, even if a VP Engineering runs the day-to-day team.

**Translating business goals into a roadmap.** A founder says "we need to take payments" or "we need to pass a security review before this contract closes." The CTO turns that into a sequence of engineering work with a timeline attached.

At an early-stage company, one person often does all five. At a larger one, the CTO sets direction and a VP Engineering executes it.

## CTO vs. CIO vs. VP Engineering

These three titles get used interchangeably and shouldn't be.

A **CIO (chief information officer)** typically owns internal IT: the company's own systems, internal tooling, employee hardware, and IT security operations. A CTO owns the technology the company sells or runs its product on. Some smaller companies collapse both into one role; larger ones keep them separate because internal IT and product engineering pull in different directions.

A **VP Engineering** manages the engineering team day to day: hiring, performance, sprint planning, delivery. A CTO sets the technical direction the VP Engineering's team executes against. At a company small enough to have only one of the two titles, whoever holds it does both jobs.

## When a company needs a CTO and doesn't have one

The gap shows up in predictable ways: a founder who can write code but has never made an architecture decision that has to survive three years of scale, a Series A company that raised on a roadmap nobody senior has vetted, or a team about to sign a healthcare or fintech contract that requires someone to own the security and compliance posture in writing.

Hiring a full-time CTO to close that gap is slow. A search for a senior technical executive commonly runs several months once you count sourcing, interviews, and negotiation, and a loaded senior hire costs well into six figures a year once salary, equity, and benefits are counted. Many companies at this stage do not have a year's worth of full-time CTO work; they have a quarter's worth of decisions that need to be made correctly, once.

## The fractional alternative

That's the gap the fractional model closes: a company buys the CTO function part-time, from someone who has made these decisions before, without the multi-month search and without the full-time salary commitment. We cover exactly what that role does and doesn't cover in [what a fractional CTO is](/blog/what-is-a-fractional-cto), and what it costs in [our fractional CTO services breakdown](/blog/fractional-cto-services).

The version we run pairs technical direction with the engineers who execute it, in the same subscription. A [pod](/pods) is a pod lead who owns scope and architecture, plus senior engineers who build and QA who tests, 2-5 engineers depending on plan. The lead makes the calls a CTO would make; the bench ships the work a VP Engineering's team would ship. One vendor, one invoice, no separate hire for strategy and separate hire for execution.

## The short version

A CTO is the executive who owns technology strategy, architecture, and the vendor and build decisions that turn a business goal into shipped software. A CIO owns internal IT; a VP Engineering manages the team; a CTO sets the direction both work within. Companies that need this judgment without a full-time hire increasingly buy it fractionally, often paired with the engineers who execute it in a single pod, a lead plus 2-5 engineers depending on plan.