Chief Technology Officer

Core Responsibilities

• Own architecture: service boundaries, data model, build-versus-buy decisions, and the multi-year technical roadmap.
• Build and structure the engineering organization — teams, leveling, on-call, code review standards.
• Own reliability: uptime targets, incident response, postmortems, and customer-facing SLAs.
• Own security and compliance readiness (SOC 2 Type II is effectively table stakes for B2B by Series B).
• Manage cloud spend as a real line item; infrastructure cost per customer becomes a gross-margin question.
• Partner with the CPO on what is feasible, what is expensive, and what accrues technical debt.
• Serve as the technical voice in fundraising diligence and in strategic customer conversations.

What Investors Want From the CTO

Technical diligence at Series B is real: investors bring in an outside architect or CTO-in-residence to review the stack.

• An architecture that plausibly supports 10x current load without a rewrite — or an honest, costed plan for the rewrite.
• Gross-margin credibility: infrastructure cost per unit of revenue, and a path to improving it.
• A security story: SOC 2 status, penetration test results, access controls, and incident history.
• Low key-person risk. If one engineer is the only person who understands the core system, that is a diligence finding.
• Engineering velocity evidence: deploy frequency, cycle time, and how much capacity goes to maintenance versus new value.
• A hiring plan with realistic ramp assumptions, not a headcount number pulled from the financial model.
• Clarity about any AI/ML or third-party model dependency: cost, vendor risk, and data handling.

Board & Investor Relations

• Typically presents at one or two board meetings a year, plus any meeting where a platform investment is being approved.
• Prepares the technical section of the diligence data room: architecture diagram, security policies, dependency inventory.
• Fields direct technical reference calls with prospective investors' advisors.
• Reports engineering health metrics into the monthly investor update — uptime, incidents, and shipped milestones.

Metrics They Are Measured On

• Uptime and SLA attainment; number and severity of production incidents.
• Deployment frequency and lead time for change.
• Infrastructure cost as a percentage of revenue and cost per customer.
• Engineering attrition and time-to-productivity for new hires.
• Percentage of roadmap delivered per quarter and share of capacity spent on unplanned work.

Typical Backgrounds

• Technical co-founder who wrote the first version of the product.
• Staff or principal engineer from a scaled company who has seen systems at 10x the current size.
• Former VP of Engineering who has managed managers, not only individual contributors.
• Occasionally a platform or infrastructure lead brought in specifically to survive the scaling phase.

Qualifications & Skills

• Computer science degree or demonstrably equivalent depth; formal credentials matter less than shipped systems.
• Direct experience with the company's scaling dimension — high write throughput, multi-tenancy, real-time, or regulated data.
• Cloud architecture and cost management; ownership of a six- or seven-figure cloud bill.
• Security fundamentals and prior experience carrying an organization through SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Managerial range: can hire, level, coach, and remove engineers.

First 90 Days After the Round

• Audit the architecture against the next 18 months of load and write down the three riskiest constraints.
• Establish incident process, on-call rotation, and a real postmortem habit.
• Define engineering levels and hire the first engineering managers rather than more individual contributors.
• Start or complete SOC 2 Type II if selling to enterprise buyers.
• Instrument delivery metrics so velocity claims are measured, not asserted.

Common Failure Modes

• Remaining the best individual engineer instead of becoming a multiplier for fifty of them.
• Premature microservices, or the opposite — deferring architectural work until the platform is failing weekly.
• Treating security and compliance as a later problem, then losing enterprise deals to it.
• Hiring engineers faster than the management structure can absorb them.

Compensation Benchmarks

Series A CTOs typically earn $180k–$230k with founder-level or 1–3% equity. Series B CTOs typically earn $250k–$320k; a non-founder CTO hired at Series B commonly receives 1–2.5% equity.

Ranges reflect typical US venture-backed companies and vary widely by market, sector, and location.