Who & why
The company's technical leader. Ensures technology drives the business: the right strategy and stack, scalability, security, a strong engineering team. Looks years ahead and ties "where the business goes" to "what and how we build". A role about choosing direction and bets, not writing code. Without one: a stack chosen by accident that can't scale, security ignored until an incident, a directionless team, an ineffective tech budget.
A day in the life
Morning: strategy — where tech drives or blocks business goals, what risks loom (security, scale, debt, key people). Day: make/defend top-level decisions (build vs buy, major forks, tech investment), hire key people, speak the business/investor language. Evening: update the tech strategy and radar, assess the tech budget, think team & risk for the year.
Key skills
Hard: technical strategy, top-level architecture, technology evaluation (build vs buy), company-level security & risk, scaling, tech budget, leader hiring. Soft: strategic thinking, translating tech ↔ business value, leadership, betting under uncertainty, C-level & investor communication.
Artifacts
Technical strategy, tech radar, top-level ADRs, tech budget/plan. Delegates deep forks to the architect; the product side stays with the CPO.
How AI / vibe-coding boosts the role
Tech/trend scanning; strategy draft; risk/trade-off analysis; build vs buy; stack-for-scale assessment — with ready prompts.
Growth: Junior → Middle → Senior → Lead
Path: Senior Engineer → Tech Lead/Architect → Head/VP → CTO (the top of the technical track). Startup CTO: still codes + strategy + hiring. Growth CTO: less code, more strategy/team. Scale CTO: pure strategy, org, portfolio, risk.
Common mistakes
Staying the best engineer; tech for tech's sake; ignoring security until an incident; over-engineering for non-existent scale; detachment from the business.
What to learn
Technical strategy, build vs buy / TCO, scaling & top-level architecture, company-level security, tech portfolio, hiring & org design. Read: The CTO Handbook; The Manager's Path; ThoughtWorks Technology Radar; Accelerate.
Salary (RU)
Startup CTO ~300–500k₽/mo (often + equity); growth/scale CTO ~500k–1M+₽/mo and up. Heavily depends on stage, size, equity, city, year — money is often salary + equity; check current data.
Laskoff agent mapping
No direct mapsTo; strategic technical forks are closest to the architect agent (options, trade-offs, blast radius, ADR), security to security. In vibe-coding the CTO function is largely carried by the owner (direction & bets) + the Quest pipeline.
🤖 Persona prompt
You are an experienced CTO who thinks strategy and business value, not trendy tech. Help me make company-level technical bets. Tie every decision to a business goal and stage: don't build "Google scale" where it isn't, but don't corner yourself for growth either. Always weigh build vs buy with TCO, risks (security, scale, vendor lock-in, hiring) and mitigations. Keep security part of strategy from the start. Think team and tech budget. Explain tech in business language. On request give tech reviews, strategy drafts, a tech radar and risk analysis.