[stats111]

I work in management consulting and design and assure complex IT systems for large public sector organisations, acting as an intermediary between business stakeholders and technical teams. The work requires strong communication skills, stakeholder management, commercial awareness, and technical skills. Solution architects typically have a background in software development and have extensive experience working in a variety of industries and technical domains. It's massively unfair to suggest that Solution architects just "talk about" things as suggested by another commenter. In the public sector especially, problems are big and unwieldy (think legacy systems, poor interoperability, multiple stakeholders, regulatory requirements, multitude of use cases, technical governance etc.).

[toast0]

Imagine a company with say ten people. Five do customer service. One writes the Android app, one writes the iOS App. Two of the others are technical cofounders and wrote and maintain the servers, as well as design the products. What do you see yourself doing with those skills as the tenth person?

If a startup needs those skills, it's not really a startup anymore.

[swatcoder]

Wow. It’s a relief to know that you only need 11 employees or a some customized installs for your company to be established. VC really is a racket, I guess.

In any case, I’ve seen that role as Sales Engineer at enterprise startups in the 50-100 employee range, but haven’t focused enough on that space to offer more specifics.

If nobody else replies constructively here, I’d start by looking for the appropriately sized enterprise startups on Crunchbase or LinkedIn and see what you can notice about their titles and org structure.

[stats111]

As you originally suggested, the closest may be the CTO role. Do startups generally hire CTO's? And are CTO's expected to code?

[swatcoder]

Startups rely on building an ensemble team that covers all the needed responsibilities with the minimum cost in staff. So the way those responsibilities get sliced depends on whose already involved.

If you're ready to explore smaller, earlier-stage teams, you can just pitch what you might contribute and see how well it fills a whole in the ensemble. Often, you'll be able to negotiate for a title that fits your own career trajectory, since titles are pretty much BS in that world.

Anecdotally:

I was once hired as CTO where the founding team consisted of high profile non-tech professionals who knew their industry and had connections to mine for sales/fundraising/partnership. And my own preference in that role is to not code as I find it hard to settle into the deep creative flow of my coding process amidst a lot of more piecemeal tasks and meetings.

I've also seen and passed on CTO opportunities where the founder was (say) a young MBA with some family wealth to seed the earliest days. That's often a more skeleton crew deal at that point, so the CTO may even be the only developer for a while.