I would like to know what an appropriate job designation is for somebody working in a startup company and supervising software development there.
Let's suppose the key responsibilites of this person are:
- advising the executive board in product (software) development and science
- supervising any software projects & other developers
- head of development, i.e. leading the major software projects in the startup
- developing the core products
In most startups the hierarchies are pretty flat, thus most of the work time is spent on developing the core products. Let's suppose this is done with data science in this case, i.e. developing predictive models, statistics, using machine learning & artificial intelligence approaches.
Development is mostly done in Python, hence I guess even Python developer would fit? Although this might be too implicit/vague for the real responsiblities when talking to investors?!
Calling such an employee a Chief technology officer (CTO) seems overbearing to me, since a (small) startup does not compare to the size, tasks, responisibilities or hierarchy of a well established company, where things like CEO, CTO, would perfectly fit for executive staff.
However, Wikipedia says a "CTO is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupation is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization.", which would fit for the mentioned responsibilites.
Therefore I would like to know what an appropriate job designation would be for such an employee.
Would you use one specific job designation for business cards, mail signatures, contacts to other companies, and so forth? Or would you change your job designation for different occasions? Like CTO for investors, head of development for business cards and simply data scientist for the daily business?
Answers should include an explanation why the proposed job designation is both: not "overbearing" and appropriate for established professionals, i.e. explicit enough for investors or bigger companies in general.