Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Chief of Development

🎯 Role Definition

The Chief of Development (also commonly titled Head of Development or VP of Engineering) is the senior technology leader responsible for defining and executing the organization's software development strategy, building and scaling high-performing engineering teams, and ensuring predictable, secure, and customer-focused delivery of products. This role balances long-term architecture and technical direction with day-to-day delivery, partnering closely with Product, Design, Security, and GTM teams to align engineering efforts with business outcomes, OKRs, and revenue goals. The Chief of Development drives engineering culture, talent development, process excellence (Agile/DevOps), and cost-effective use of cloud and platform technologies.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Director of Engineering with cross-functional product delivery experience
Senior Engineering Manager or Group Engineering Manager leading multiple teams
Principal Architect or Head of Platform with proven people-management experience

Advancement To:

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Chief Product & Technology Officer
General Manager / EVP of Product & Technology in larger organizations

Lateral Moves:

Head of Platform / Infrastructure
Head of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
VP of Product Engineering (vertical-specific)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own and articulate the engineering strategy and roadmap that supports the company's product vision and business objectives, translating strategic goals into measurable engineering OKRs and KPIs (velocity, quality, uptime, time-to-market).
Lead, coach, and scale cross-functional engineering teams (frontend, backend, mobile, QA, SRE, DevOps) to deliver large-scale, customer-facing products on time and within budget while maintaining high morale and low attrition.
Define and enforce software architecture standards and best practices, ensuring systems are modular, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with cloud-native principles (microservices, serverless, event-driven architectures).
Drive technical roadmap prioritization in partnership with Product and Design, balancing innovation, technical debt reduction, security and compliance, and customer-facing feature delivery.
Own delivery excellence and release management: implement CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, release orchestration, and observability to achieve predictable, low-risk product launches.
Establish and optimize engineering processes (Agile, Scrum, Kanban) and governance, including sprint planning, program increment planning, cross-team dependencies, and tooling to improve throughput and cycle time.
Manage the engineering budget, vendor relationships, and technology investments, making data-driven decisions on platform choices (cloud providers, data stores, messaging systems) to optimize cost, performance, and time-to-value.
Define hiring strategies, interviewing frameworks, and competency models to attract top technical talent, grow bench strength, and ensure inclusive recruiting and onboarding practices.
Design and run performance management, career ladders, and learning programs to develop engineering leaders and technical experts, including mentoring, promotions, and succession planning.
Implement and maintain security-by-design and privacy practices across the SDLC, working closely with security, legal, and compliance teams to meet regulatory requirements (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).
Improve system reliability and availability by setting SLOs/SLAs, incident response practices, postmortem culture, and investments in monitoring, alerting, and automated remediation.
Lead cross-functional initiatives for major technical projects, platform migrations, or re-architectures, coordinating product, operations, and business stakeholders to minimize disruption and deliver ROI.
Champion quality engineering and test automation strategies, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, to reduce defects, rework, and production incidents.
Spearhead performance tuning and capacity planning to meet growth targets, ensuring systems handle scale, concurrency, latency, and data throughput requirements.
Serve as the primary technical liaison to executive leadership and the board for development status, major risks, technical debt, and long-term technology roadmap justifications.
Drive metrics and reporting for engineering (lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, defect rate, technical debt ratio) and present actionable insights to leadership to influence business decisions.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, and innovation, sponsoring hack weeks, proof-of-concepts, and R&D efforts to validate new technologies and product ideas.
Lead database and data platform strategy in coordination with Data Engineering and Product teams, ensuring data integrity, access patterns, and analytics needs are met for product and BI use cases.
Ensure regulatory compliance and data governance by integrating secure coding standards, encryption, identity and access management, and third-party risk assessments into development lifecycle.
Negotiate SLAs and partnerships with third-party providers, consultants, and outsourcing partners to augment capacity or provide specialized expertise while protecting IP and data security.
Create and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans for critical systems, validating recovery objectives and runbooks through regular drills and audits.
Promote cost-conscious engineering practices, rightsizing cloud resources, optimizing compute/storage, and leveraging observability to reduce waste and improve unit economics.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Engage with customers and sales teams for technical pre-sales support, technical due diligence, and customer escalations when required.
Represent the engineering organization at industry events, conferences, and customer briefings to build credibility and employer brand.
Facilitate cross-functional retrospectives and continuous improvement workshops to surface systemic issues and implement remediation plans.
Oversee documentation standards for architecture, runbooks, APIs, and developer experience to accelerate onboarding and reduce knowledge silos.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven software architecture and systems design skills for distributed, high-availability systems; deep experience with microservices, event-driven systems, and domain-driven design.
Cloud architecture expertise (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including provisioning, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), cost optimization, and multi-region deployments.
Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automation tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) and test automation frameworks.
Strong knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and operational patterns for platform teams.
Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic), logging, tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), and SLO-based reliability.
Hands-on experience with backend technologies and databases (SQL, NoSQL, caching strategies) and familiarity with data pipelines and message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
Familiar with security practices in the SDLC: threat modeling, secure coding, authentication/authorization (OAuth, OIDC), and vulnerability management tools (SAST/DAST).
Track record with performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost/performance trade-offs at internet scale.
Familiarity with product management and roadmapping tools (Jira, Asana, Aha!) and techniques for prioritization and stakeholder alignment.
Experience leading large-scale technical migrations, platform consolidations, or greenfield initiatives with measurable outcomes.
Data-driven decision-making skills: ability to define, track, and interpret engineering metrics and KPIs to drive continuous improvement.
Experience with enterprise integration patterns, API design (REST, GraphQL), and API governance.

Soft Skills

Strategic leadership with ability to translate business strategy into technical plans and motivate teams to achieve stretch goals.
Exceptional communication skills for presenting complex technical concepts to executives, customers, and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong people management: hiring, mentoring, coaching, conflict resolution, and performance management across diverse and remote teams.
Influential collaborator who can build consensus across Product, Sales, Marketing, Legal, and Operations.
Customer-obsessed mindset with strong product sensibilities and the ability to prioritize impact over effort.
High emotional intelligence, resilience, and ability to lead through ambiguity and change.
Decision-making under uncertainty: comfortable balancing speed and quality while managing risk.
Strong project management and organizational skills, capable of managing multiple programs concurrently.
Advocacy for psychological safety, diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering culture.
Negotiation and vendor management skills to secure favorable terms and manage third-party relationships.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent technical degree with significant hands-on experience.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MSc) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or MBA for candidates with strong cross-functional product/business experience.
Executive education or leadership certifications (e.g., leadership programs, scaling engineering leadership courses) considered a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering
Information Systems / Data Science
Business Administration (for technically-oriented MBAs)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5+ years in senior management (Director or above), or 8+ years in progressive leadership roles for smaller companies.

Preferred:

12–20+ years overall engineering experience with a proven record of building, scaling, and leading engineering organizations (managing teams of 50+ engineers desirable).
Demonstrated track record of shipping large-scale products, leading platform or architecture transformations, and managing multi-million-dollar engineering budgets.
Experience in SaaS, cloud-native products, high-availability consumer or enterprise systems, and working with security/compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR).
Prior experience recruiting and developing senior engineering managers, principal engineers, and cross-functional technical leaders.