Hire an Interim CTO · Interim CTO Jobs UK
Interim CTO Jobs · hire interim CTO
for the gap, or hire CTO
Hire an interim CTO — a full-time interim Chief Technology Officer on a fixed-term assignment, usually 3–12 months — to cover a vacancy, steady an engineering team or land a programme. Or browse live interim CTO jobs and interim CTO roles UK-wide below.
- £800–£1,800 a day (Exec Capital)
- Full-time, fixed-term
- 3–12 months typical
- Shortlist of 3–5
How a brief runswhat we undertake
- 01Brief30-MINUTE SCOPING CALLDay 0
- 02Shortlist of 3–5VETTED · RATE BENCHMARK · IR35After the brief
- 03InterviewsYOU MEET THE SHORTLISTYour diary
- 04Scoped startFIRST-MONTH OUTCOMES AGREEDYou set the date
- 05Fractional, interim and permanentIR35 POSITION SET OUTOn every brief
Shortlist3–5
15 minutes · video or phone
Book 15 minutes to hire an interim CTO
Tell us the situation and the start date. We come back with interim CTO candidates, their day rates and availability.
- 0115 minutes, video or phone
- 02We scope the assignment and the start date
- 03A shortlist of 3–5 after the call
- 04Fractional, interim and permanent briefs
Pick a day that suits · live availability
Interim CTO jobs · last 3 months
Live Interim CTO jobs
No live Interim CTO roles right now.
We only show real, verified vacancies from the last three months — we never pad the board with fabricated listings. New Interim CTO roles appear here as our pipeline finds them.
01/ definition
What is an interim CTO?
An interim CTO is the Chief Technology Officer, full-time, for a fixed term. Not an adviser and not a part-time fractional CTO: the person who runs technology until the job is done or the permanent hire arrives.
01 · cadence
The CTO seat, five days a week.
An interim CTO takes the role in full — the engineering team, the architecture, the roadmap and the budget — rather than advising from outside it.
02/ scope
What an interim Chief Technology Officer owns
The interim CTO carries the technology accountability for the term; the team keeps the day-to-day delivery.
- Technology strategy and roadmap
- Architecture and build-vs-buy decisions
- Engineering team structure and hiring
- Technology budget and vendor contracts
- Security and platform risk
- Board and investor technology reporting
- Technical due diligence
- Handover to the permanent CTO
- Writing production code
- Sprint-level ticket management
- On-call and incident rotas
- QA and test execution
- DevOps pipeline upkeep
- Day-to-day line management below leads
03/ alternatives
Interim CTO vs fractional, contract and permanent
The same seat, four ways of filling it. If you searched “interim fractional CTO”, the first tab is the one that matters.
→ Interim covers the whole seat for a period; fractional covers part of the seat indefinitely.
04/ rates
Interim CTO day rates, UK 2026
Published figures only, each with its source. Where an interim CTO lands in the band depends on the size of the estate, the urgency and the sector.
- Interim CTO£800–£1,800Exec Capital 2026
- Fractional / contract CTO£800–£1,500Hyperact 2024
- Fractional CTO£1,000–£1,600Leadership Services 2026
Full-time month at 21 working days: £16,800–£37,800. Six months: roughly £104,000–£234,000 — our arithmetic on the Exec Capital band.
05/ calculator
What an interim CTO costs
Model a fixed-term interim CTO against a permanent Chief Technology Officer over the same period.
£1,300 a day is within the published Interim CTO band (£800–£1,800, Exec Capital 2026).
Interim cost for the term
£169,000
130 working days · 5 d/wk · 6 mo · before tax
Interim costs more over 6 months£28,563
Book a 15-minute call →Our arithmetic, indicative. Permanent = the £160,500 median CTO base (Robert Half) pro rata for the same months, plus 15% employer NI, plus a 30% search fee on the annual base (UK retained search runs 25–35%, Headhunters.co.uk). Excludes pension, bonus and equity.
06/ tax
Is an interim CTO tax-deductible?
General position under UK rules, with the HMRC source for each point. Not tax advice — check your own case with your accountant.
01 · DEDUCTIBLE
The fees are a business expense
An interim CTO’s fees, like a salary, are deductible against profits when incurred wholly and exclusively for the trade (HMRC BIM37000). At the 25% main rate, each £1,000 of fees costs a profitable company £750 after relief.
02 · EMPLOYER NI
Employer NI follows IR35 status
A permanent CTO carries employer National Insurance at 15% (gov.uk). An interim engaged through their own company carries none when the engagement is outside IR35; inside IR35, the fee-payer deducts tax and NI and pays employer NI. Status depends on how the engagement runs in practice.
03 · WHO DECIDES
IR35 status, by company size
Medium and large clients determine the interim’s status themselves; for a small private-sector client, the interim’s own company decides (HMRC off-payroll guidance).
07/ decision
When to hire an interim CTO
Four situations where companies hire an interim CTO rather than wait for a permanent one — and where most interim CTO jobs come from.
Which sounds like you?
A resignation, a founder stepping back or a performance exit leaves the seat empty and the team without direction.
- → Hold the roadmap
- → Keep the team
- → Run the permanent search
Outages, runaway cloud cost, a stalled migration or a security incident that needs a senior owner now.
- → Stabilise first
- → Fix the root cause
- → Report to the board
Technical due diligence, post-acquisition integration or getting the story straight before a funding round.
- → DD readiness
- → Integration plan
- → Investor confidence
A replatform, an AI build or a regulatory deadline that the current team cannot lead alone.
- → Defined outcome
- → Fixed term
- → Clean handover
08/ guide
Hiring an interim CTO: what to get right
Start with the outcome, not the title. An interim CTO is hired to leave something behind — a stable platform, a rebuilt team, a finished migration, a clean due-diligence pack. Write that into the brief with a date, and the right candidates select themselves; leave it vague and you will be comparing CVs rather than approaches.
Decide between interim and fractional early. If the work needs a full-time owner for a few months, hire an interim CTO. If it needs senior judgement a day or two a week for the foreseeable future, a fractional CTO is cheaper and steadier. Companies searching for an “interim fractional CTO” are usually weighing the two; both are possible, but price and scope them separately.
Budget from the published bands. Exec Capital’s 2026 guide puts interim CTO day rates at £800–£1,800. At five days a week that is £16,800–£37,800 a month, and a six-month assignment runs roughly £104,000–£234,000 — our arithmetic. A permanent Chief Technology Officer is a median £160,500 base (Robert Half) before employer National Insurance, pension, equity and a retained search fee of 25–35%.
Check the track record against your situation. An interim CTO who has run a platform migration at a Series B company is a different hire from one who has held the seat through a trade sale. Ask for two references from the last three assignments and speak to them yourself; we do the same before anyone reaches a shortlist.
Plan the handover on day one. The best interim Chief Technology Officers work to make themselves unnecessary: documenting decisions, developing the engineering leads and, often, helping you hire their permanent successor. If you are looking for interim CTO jobs rather than hiring, the live board below lists current interim CTO roles, and fractional CTO jobs cover the part-time market.
08.1/ temporary cto
Temporary CTO: what to hand over, and what to hold
A temporary CTO, or temporary Chief Technology Officer, is an interim CTO by another name: full-time, for a fixed term, with authority over the engineering team, the architecture and the technology budget. The Institute of Interim Management defines interim management as leadership by a board or near-board level executive “over a finite time span”, and separates it from a contractor’s contract or an agency worker’s temporary work (IIM guide to interim management). If you need someone to write code or deliver one project, that is a contract hire; if you need the seat held, it is a temporary CTO.
The first job is usually to stop things slipping: releases, incidents, supplier renewals and security. Two government baselines make that concrete. Cyber Essentials, the minimum standard the government recommends and the NCSC developed, covers firewalls, secure configuration, security updates, user access control and malware protection. The voluntary Software Security Code of Practice sets out what software vendors are expected to do about the security and resilience of what they ship. A temporary CTO should be able to tell the board where the business stands against both.
If the need is ongoing and part-time rather than a full-time gap, a part-time CTO or a fractional CTO fits better. For a temporary CTO, we send a shortlist of three to five with day rate, availability and IR35 position set out.
08.2/ temporary cto hiring
Temporary CTO hiring: set the term and the handover
Most temporary CTO hiring starts from one of three situations: a CTO has left and the permanent search will take time, a departure is coming and you want cover in place, or a programme — a migration, a rebuild, a due diligence process — needs a senior owner for as long as it runs. In each case “temporary” means interim: the whole seat, full-time, for a defined period.
Set the term by the outcome rather than the calendar. Write down what must be true at the end — the platform stable, the migration live, a permanent CTO in post — and agree a review point part-way through. Put the handover in the brief as well: who the temporary CTO hands to, what gets documented, and whether they help recruit and induct their successor. The Institute of Interim Management treats the exit, including knowledge transfer and sourcing successors, as a stage of the assignment in its own right (IIM guide to interim management).
On the contract, a temporary CTO is engaged either as a fixed-term employee, whose contract ends on a set date or when a specific task is done, or as a contractor through their own limited company. For a contractor, IR35 status depends on how the engagement runs in practice, and medium and large clients make the determination (HMRC off-payroll guidance).
08.3/ interim chief technology officer
Interim Chief Technology Officer: assess the level, not the title
The title interim Chief Technology Officer covers a wide range of people, from engineering managers who held the title at a small company to executives who have run technology for a board. The SFIA framework is a useful yardstick: its highest level of responsibility describes someone who “determines overall organisational vision and strategy, and assumes accountability for overall success”. Ask candidates for evidence at that level — decisions they owned, budgets they held, what they reported to a board.
Test the board side as well as the technical side. The NCSC’s Cyber Security Toolkit for Boards includes questions a board should ask about cyber security; a strong interim Chief Technology Officer can answer them in plain language. Structure the interviews, too: the CIPD’s guidance on selection methods favours structured, panel-scored interviews and work-sample tasks, and for a CTO a review of your architecture or incident history works well.
IR35 for an interim CTO depends on how the assignment runs in practice; medium and large clients make the status determination, and HMRC’s CEST tool gives HMRC’s view of a specific engagement. If the role is really about the systems that run the business rather than the product it sells, see hiring an interim CIO.
09/ contract
Interim CTO jobs: how the assignment is contracted
Interim CTO jobs are usually contracted through the interim’s own limited company, on a fixed-term agreement that sets out the scope, the term, the day rate, the days a week and notice on each side. The scope is the outcome from the brief: the migration, the rebuild or the handover the assignment exists to deliver.
IR35 status turns on how the assignment runs in practice, not on what the contract calls it. HMRC looks at substitution, control and whether either side must offer or accept further work. Medium and large clients make the status determination; for a small private-sector client, the interim’s own company does (HMRC off-payroll guidance). See the IR35 guide.
TEST 1
Substitution
Whether the interim’s company could send a suitably qualified substitute, and whether that right is genuine in practice.
What HMRC looks atTEST 2
Control
Who decides how the work is done, as distinct from what the assignment must deliver.
What HMRC looks atTEST 3
Mutuality
Whether either side is obliged to offer or accept work beyond the agreed assignment.
What HMRC looks at10/ process
How to hire an interim CTO with us
What we undertake on every brief.
- 01
Brief
A 30-minute call on the assignment, the start date and what the interim CTO must have delivered by the end of the term.
DAY 0 - 02
Search
We search and screen against that brief: track record at your stage and in your situation, and references we take ourselves.
SCREENING - 03
Shortlist
Three to five candidates with day rate, availability and IR35 position set out.
SHORTLIST OF 3–5 - 04
Start
You interview and choose. The interim you choose contracts with you.
YOU CHOOSE
11/ questions
Interim CTO FAQ
Hiring an interim Chief Technology Officer, or looking for interim CTO jobs.
Book 15 minutes · shortlist of 3–5
Hiring an interim CTO? Start with the brief.
Book 15 minutes.
