Field CTO / Site CTO

A Field CTO, called Site CTO at some companies, is a technical leader employed by a software product company whose job faces outward: customers, partners, and the market. A company CTO owns the product and the engineering organization inside the company. A Field CTO sits across the table from the customer's CTO as a peer, and carries what they learn in the field back into the product. The role settled in data and infrastructure platform companies. AI companies have started hiring for it.

What the work is

1. You decide the deployment design with the customer's leadership. You explain architecture, security, and scale to the customer's CTO and their technical owners, and you decide together how adoption will work. You do not hand over documentation. You prove how the product behaves in their environment.
2. You lead the technical review during the deal. You are in from the first conversation, and you own the demo and the proof of concept. One practicing Field CTO describes the role as the person who can talk technical strategy without sounding like they are trying to close a deal.
3. You own integration with the customer's systems, from scoping to deployment. At some companies you write the code yourself. One enterprise AI company's Site CTO posting lists a hands-on engineering lead as a requirement.
4. At some companies, you build and run the local technical team. A company entering a new market will make this its first technical leader and have them stand up engineering, integration, and presales. Where a local organization already exists, the role is usually an individual contributor.
5. You feed the field back into the product, and represent the company outside it. Customer needs and market direction go into the roadmap. You speak for the company at conferences and to the press.

How it differs from a company CTO

The letters CTO make it read like the top technical job or a startup founding CTO. Three things are different.

• The direction is different. A company CTO looks inward: product, engineering organization, technical strategy. A Field CTO looks outward: customers, partners, market.
• The ownership is different. A company CTO owns the product and the whole engineering organization. A Field CTO owns whether customers get results from the product, and whether the product takes hold in their market.
• The headcount is different. There is one company CTO. Field CTOs are assigned by region or industry, so a company can have several. Postings come out split by APAC, EMEA, Americas, Japan, public sector.

How it differs from nearby roles

• Company CTO: inward versus outward. Covered above.
• VP of Engineering: different organization. A VP of Engineering runs the engineering organization and owns shipping. A Field CTO does not run the engineering organization that builds the product. Any team they have exists to serve local customers.
• Country Manager: different ownership. A Country Manager owns revenue and the whole local organization. A Field CTO owns technology and customer outcomes. Entering a new market, these two are sometimes the first two leaders on the ground.

What companies look for

People arrive from solutions architecture, principal engineering, former CTO seats, and founding. Country-specific roles require English plus the local language. Lay dozens of public Field CTO postings on top of each other and the requirements converge on three things.

• Engineering and architecture experience shipping real products. Most postings ask for substantial seniority. Some look specifically for former CTOs and CIOs, or solutions architects.
• Explaining technology to the customer's leadership in business terms. Presales, solutions architecture, and technical consulting backgrounds all count.
• At some companies, having built and led a team. Where the role is the first technical leader in a new market, expect Director or VP level management experience, or founding experience.

FAQ

Are Field CTO and Site CTO the same role? The names alone will not tell you. Field CTO is the term the industry uses. Site CTO is what one enterprise AI company calls its country-level technical leader, and that same company posts the equivalent role as Field CTO in some regions. But that company's version is hands-on: writing code, building a local team. That is different work from the advisory Field CTO common elsewhere. Read the posting, not the title.

Do you write code, or manage a team? It depends on the company. At data and infrastructure platform companies, a Field CTO usually does neither. They advise customers and carry field requirements back to the product team. At companies hiring the role as a first technical leader in a new market, you write code and build the local team. Either way you spend a lot of time at customer sites. One practicing Field CTO put it plainly: if you cannot travel regularly, do not take this job.

Are companies hiring Field CTOs in Korea? Public postings are rare. Global platform and AI companies usually hire this role at a regional level, APAC or Japan. That said, AI companies that have entered Korea have appointed Korea-specific technical leads.