What does a Head of Software Development do?

A Head of Software Development is the manager who leads the developers of a company and answers for what they ship. The position reports to the managing director or to the CTO. Some firms call it Director of Software Development or Software Development Manager. German job ads call it Leiter Softwareentwicklung.

The tasks of the position

The management of a firm needs two answers from its development team. When does a change go live? Who carries on when a developer leaves?

The release plan answers the first question. The Head of Software Development plans the releases of the next months and gives the management a date for them. Projects are estimated before they start. An estimate written as a range shows how certain a date is.

Code review answers the second question. A second person reads a change before it is merged. After that, more than one person knows the code.

The position also covers the people in the team. The Head of Software Development writes the profile for a new developer with HR and decides on the hire with the management. Onboarding and apprenticeships are planned here too. Where the developers use AI coding tools, the Head of Software Development writes the rules for the team and for the coding agents.

Head of Software Development, team lead and CTO

The three titles overlap, and firms draw the lines in different places. The table shows one split for a firm with one development team.

A Head of Software Development fits a firm with one development team whose managing director sets the technology course. A CTO fits when software is the product and the technology needs a seat in the management.

Startups often use the title Head of Engineering for the same work. A Head of Engineering answers for the team that builds the product: hiring, onboarding, releases and code quality. When a founder is the CTO, the Head of Engineering takes the team off the founder’s desk. I keep a checklist of what a new developer and a new coding agent need on the first day.

What I have done in this field

I am an IT expert for data platforms. I have built software for more than twenty years and have more than ten years of leadership experience, with teams of up to 50 employees.

For online shops of Lidl and REWE I led projects and programmed front ends and back ends. For a global real estate database I hired people and led the teams that built its web solutions. As CIO of a Frankfurt fintech I held the budgets and coordinated four teams. In leadership I see myself as a sparring partner for my colleagues.

I hold a training authorization from the IHK Frankfurt for two IT apprenticeships, one of them in application development.

Today AI agents speed up my work. On a client’s platform Claude and Codex work in one repository with the developers. The agents’ credentials cannot push to production. The work has produced more than 300 RESTful API endpoints and more than 8,000 commits.

I support companies as a Head of Software Development, as a freelancer or as a permanent employee.