May 28, 2025

An Additional Strategic Shift Commentators and practitioners in this space talk of significant strategic shifts. These are shifts towards data-centric planning, shifts towards developer-driven decision making and (of course, no surprise) shifts towards deeper penetration of AI. “The enterprise software market has moved beyond the days when you'd simply buy Oracle or SAP (or other) and run your entire business through it. Today we see that software-as-a-service vendors, especially in the realm of data management, now fiercely compete for specific use cases. Just look at Databricks versus Snowflake with their similar offerings but distinct strengths in ML/AI and reporting analytics, respectively. This shift requires product teams to implement an additional strategic layer connecting existing offerings with customer goals and new capabilities. Field CTOs now operate on two fronts: helping customers navigate externally while reducing internal friction between initial concept and delivered value,” said Viraj Parekh , VP of sales engineering, co-founder and former field CTO at orchestration-centric DataOps platform Astronomer. It’s A Platform Play The field CTO appears to be especially prevalent in platform-type software companies i.e. those selling software services designed to get deeply woven into a customer's digital ecosystem. In this regard, perhaps think about Databricks rather than Zoom. These aren't plug-and-play tools; they're significant commitments that transform how businesses operate. “As these platforms have become more sophisticated, turning business goals into technical reality has become increasingly complex. That's where I come in,” enthused an upbeat Kenneth Stott , field CTO at Hasura, creators of the PromptQL data agent that enables reliable AI systems to work on data. “Software vendors need someone in a role who can talk tech strategy without sounding like they're just trying to close a deal. The best field CTOs aren't primarily sales-driven - they're relationship builders. Customers need to see them as trusted peers who can think through all the mess i.e. technical requirements, organizational impact, policy implications, change management challenges - all of it. They're typically partnering with the customer's CTO or their direct reports to make things happen.” So then, is the role becoming more widespread? It appears to be more common in companies selling complex technical platforms, although there aren’t many formal studies of this yet (** technology analyst house suddenly thinks about commissioning report**) and many customers aren’t always that familiar with the job title. More Than Glorified Pre-Sales? “Looking at where we are now in field sales (and questioning how formalized and standardized this position is), it has to be said that some field CTOs are somewhere close to being glorified pre-sales engineers, while others are pure strategic consultants. You’ll find different reporting structures, influence levels and responsibilities across companies, but they're all operating in that sweet spot between technical expertise and strategic advisory,” details Stott, before listing this role’s key function as follows: Bringing customer feedback to product teams, helping shape roadmaps. Creating thought leadership and developing architecture patterns, frameworks and concepts that align with products (which indirectly drives sales). Acting as technology evangelists, working one-on-one with customers as trusted advisors. As this role starts to further cement itself in management structures, the Hasura tech leader thinks there's no urgent need to reinvent it. He suggests that field CTOs are “naturally positioned to become ecosystem orchestrators” now. Which means that they will help coordinate multiple vendors around customer objectives. As technology ecosystems get more complex, having someone who can see the big picture while understanding the technical details becomes even more important. Pressure Points & Pointers “Today we can say that field CTOs have a special opportunity because we aren’t trapped in the lab or behind a desk. Since we’re at technology industry shows and in the room interacting with customers and prospects, so we get to see what’s really happening across the new, unexpected use cases, the rising pressures and needs and so much more. You only learn about those by being out in the world. The value of listening to leaders about how, where, and why they want to use our software services is immense, because it changes the equation. It’s not us telling them about how they need to use our software or our latest engineering marvels. Instead, we get to focus on business problems, which is where the real value really comes from,” said Michael Donahue , Pentaho global field CTO. “The job is a really mix of cheerleading, problem solving and applying front-line feedback directly into how we build and deliver for customers.” Field Engineering Evolution Manesh Tailor agrees. He is field CTO for EMEA region at New Relic. Tailor began his career as a developer and has spent close to 20 years immersed in the observability and monitoring space, giving him deep industry expertise and a strong technical foundation. Tailor assumed the field CTO role at New Relic in January of 2025 following a 10-year tenure at the company where he rose through the ranks as a technical account manager, software analytics architect and most recently as the director of field engineering, EMEA. He leads a team of solution architects, who are themselves industry thought leaders. “The field CTO role at New Relic comprises a deep expertise level across three key areas: our business and technology; our customers’ business and technology; and technical thought leadership,” said Tailor. “But it’s not just about technical knowledge and complex problem solving. For me, the role is about leveraging my industry experience to encourage other software engineers to not only succeed, but to be able to differentiate themselves in their markets.” Bridging The Gap Nick Jablonski , field CTO at Domino Data Lab says that the role gravitates around the need to very responsibly “bridge and forge the gap” between how customers want to use the company’s platform, in relation to what it actually takes to make that process work in complex, real-world environments. “It’s all about crafting an amalgam and mix of technical fluency and domain expertize and being able to translate that into how a platform can help deliver on business impact. That dual (or perhaps even three-level) perspective i.e. guiding customers and influencing our own roadmap, has become more strategic in recent years. I’m now in deeper conversations about how our platform serves specific industries such as life sciences, financial services and the public sector… and how we evolve it to meet their emerging needs.” There’s a realization at this point that a Field CTO isn’t there to repeat what’s in a vendor’s technical product spec whitepaper, they have to provide validated evidence of how a product will behave in the real world, under real pressure, in a customer’s exact setup. Andy Pernsteiner , field CTO lead at Vast Data says his company’s field CTOs (plural, there are more than one) routinely build “tailored walkthroughs” with exact commands, outputs, and rationale for a client’s use case. “These field professionals run tests on behalf of customers, flag bugs based not on the spec but on how users actually expect things to work and drive feature requests back into engineering based on real operational needs - not imagined ones,” said Pernsteiner. “We’ve built a team of field CTOs with deep domain expertize in performance, networking, protocols and AI, not just generalists, but people who’ve lived the same challenges our customers face. Many of them came from the very organizations that we now support. That context matters. It means they know what’s at stake and they know what good (and not just good enough) looks like. The field CTO is there to help us cut through abstraction to deliver software services that hold up under scrutiny.” Out In The Fields Hopefully, the need to surface an analysis of this comparatively modern role is clear here. Professional software engineers who work in this position are becoming more prevalent and prominent as they now also start to receive enough media training to talk to the technology press. While the role itself may still be subject to a fair degree of flux, there appears to be a solid understanding of how and why this role is now needed among the software engineering community. The only apparent challenge now is that the software engineering community here is almost exclusively the software engineering fraternity; when we get more women in field CTO roles, things will be solidified.