Written by Sophie Vallis

Something has shifted in the engineering leadership market this year: CTOs and Heads of Engineering are choosing to go back to hands-on roles, and companies are welcoming them.

Throughout my career in tech recruitment, a CTO applying for a senior individual contributor role was treated with suspicion. Was it a step down? Had they been pushed out? Would they be bored in six months? That reaction has largely gone. For the first time, hiring teams are inviting these applications, and leaders are asking for these roles.

Two things are driving it, and they pull in the same direction. One is what candidates want. The other is what clients want.

Candidates don't want to be passed by

Engineering leaders are worried about staying hands-off at the most critical moment the industry has seen in years. AI is changing how software gets built almost month by month, and the people closest to the code are the ones learning fastest. Many leaders feel that every quarter spent in planning meetings and people management is a quarter of falling behind.

There is also a simpler reason. Most of these people are coders at heart. They moved into management because it was the route to career growth, and in a lot of companies the individual contributor path would have stalled well short of where they wanted to get to. Management was the way up, not necessarily the thing they wanted to do all day.

That is why the conversations I'm having right now sound so different from a few years ago.

Clients want the leadership skills, in a smaller team

On the hiring side, companies still want everything an ex-CTO brings: strategic thinking, strong communication, and the credibility to talk to a board, a customer or a new hire in the same afternoon. What has changed is how they want to use it.

With AI, many companies are building smaller, cracked, talent-dense engineering teams. There's less room for layers, and more need for senior people who can build. So instead of hiring a leader to manage a large team, they want someone who can lead by doing: shaping the technical direction and writing the code too.

For an ex-CTO, that is a role they can do in their sleep, with the part many of them were keen to drop taken out.

Where the two meet

The salaries on offer for hands-on roles are what tip it. Companies are paying seriously well for senior engineers who can build, and if you offer a leader that kind of money to write code and not manage people, they will bite your hand off. The thing that once forced them into management, the need for career growth, no longer applies in the same way.

The old suspicion has gone for the same reason. A CTO returning to hands-on used to raise questions about why they'd left the top job. Now it reads as a deliberate, sensible move: a leader who has seen how a whole engineering organisation works, choosing to be close to the technology while it changes faster than it ever has.

It works for both sides. The candidate gets the work they love, the growth they wanted and the pay to match. The company gets a senior engineer with the judgement of a CTO.

Thinking about going hands-on?

If you're a CTO or engineering leader considering a move back into a hands-on role, and you'd like to know what that could look like, please reach out. I'm happy to talk through the roles, the teams and the salaries on offer, with no pressure either way.

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