Head of engineering is the most senior engineering leader in a company that hasn’t yet split the job into VP of Engineering and CTO. One person, the whole function: teams, delivery, hiring, and usually the technology direction on top of it.
That’s exactly why the title confuses people, it describes a stage of the company more than a rung on anyone’s career ladder.
What the role owns
The short answer is everything, which is exactly the problem.
- Delivery. The roadmap, the deadlines, the trade-offs, with nobody above to escalate to except the CEO.
- The teams and the managers. Org shape, first EM promotions, spans of control. Often while still being the most senior technical reviewer in the building.
- Hiring. The pipeline, the bar, the closing calls. At 10 to 50 engineers this is the single biggest lever the company has.
- Technology direction. Stack decisions, architecture bets, build vs buy. The CTO half of the job, done in the gaps between the VPE half.
- The exec conversation. Budgets, board slides, the “when will it ship” question. Translation between business and engineering, in both directions.
If you hold this seat now, the Head of Engineering mentoring page shows how I work with people in it.
How the title maps
I meet this title constantly: across 3,662 sessions with 317 leaders in 17+ countries since 2019, a large share of my mentees come from Central Europe, where “head of engineering” and “head of development” are the default labels for the top engineering job in orgs of 10 to 80 engineers.
| Title | Typical company | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Head of Engineering | Startup or scale-up, ~10 to 80 engineers, common in Europe | Whole engineering function, org + tech |
| Head of Development | Agencies, enterprises, older orgs | Same accountability under an older label |
| VP of Engineering | Scale-up with a formal exec layer | The org half: teams, delivery, hiring |
| CTO | Any stage | The technology half: strategy, board, bets |
So what happens as the company grows? The job splits: strategy and the board conversation go one way, the org and delivery go the other. The person holding the combined title ends up on one side of that split, and choosing which side is one of the hardest career calls in engineering leadership.
I wrote about both halves separately: VP of Engineering vs CTO covers the split itself, and the engineering director guide covers the layer that appears underneath once the org grows.
The trap built into the role
A head of engineering carries two jobs on one calendar, and the two don’t compete fairly. Hiring, delivery, and people problems announce themselves every morning. Architecture direction, technical debt strategy, the bet that pays off in two years, none of that ever knocks on the door, so on a busy week it simply doesn’t happen.
In practice, across dozens of sessions, the result looks like this: heads of engineering who haven’t made a real technology decision in a year, or the mirror image, deeply technical heads whose management layer is quietly on fire. Both look fine from the outside until they don’t.
The fix starts with naming which job is currently losing, then protecting explicit time for it. Easier said than done under a CEO who wants both halves at full speed. That negotiation, and surviving the role until the split comes, is bread-and-butter work in 1:1 mentoring. The first session costs nothing.
The titles either side of this one
- VP of Engineering: what the role owns, vs CTO
- Engineering Director: the layer that appears under you as the org grows
- CTPO: one executive for product and technology
- Director of AI: the seat a company adds when AI outgrows your calendar
- Fractional CTO: what it is and when you need one
- Principal engineer: the IC who can carry the technology half with you
- Engineering manager: the first managers you’ll promote
- Platform engineer: when shared infrastructure needs its own team
- Technical program manager: who keeps cross-team delivery moving
