A tech lead — or, further up, a CTO — is the person who turns business goals into technical decisions: what to build, on which stack, in what order, with which team. It’s a dual job, part expertise and part management, and the balance between the two is exactly what your job ad must define.
People who genuinely carry both sides — strong enough technically to earn the team’s respect, strong enough with people to grow it — are rare, and the market prices that combination well above a senior developer. Many candidates carry the title without one of the two halves; your interviews need to test for both.
The classic miscasting mistakes: hiring a “CTO” for a two-developer team when the need is a hands-on lead, or promoting your best developer into management without support and losing a great engineer to gain a struggling manager. Match the title to the actual scope, not to what sounds impressive.
What moves the range
Scope drives price: how many people, how much architecture ownership, whether they’ll hire and manage or mostly guide the code. A hands-on lead for a small team and an executive who owns technical strategy are different markets — and the further the role tilts toward strategy, hiring responsibility and answering to the business, the smaller and pricier the pool gets.
Track record is the other lever. Someone who has already scaled a team or carried a product through real growth costs distinctly more than a first-time lead — but for a small business making its first leadership hire, that experience is often what prevents the expensive mistakes.
Writing the job ad for this role
Spell out the split: how much of the week is code, how much is management and roadmap. Say how many people they’ll lead, whom they report to, and what they actually get to decide — budget, stack, hiring. Leads leave companies where the title came without the authority, and the good ones read ads for exactly that signal. If the honest need is guidance a few days a week, say so: a fractional arrangement often beats a mis-scoped full-time hire.