How to advertise to engineering leaders and CTOs
To advertise to engineering leaders and CTOs, be where they read every day: daily.dev Ads, The Pragmatic Engineer, LeadDev and LinkedIn. daily.dev gives you a verified company page they follow and puts your posts and employer brand stories in the feed of developers who read #leadership and #architecture, in one plan we run for you.
One plan, built around your company page: we put it in front of engineering leaders and CTOs across daily.dev and report on it every week.
Who are the engineering leaders and CTOs on daily.dev?
What they read, where it comes from, and what else they follow: the signals a campaign is targeted on.
The tags that reach them
Target any mix; your plan runs the campaign on them.
- #leadership
- #career
- #architecture
- #startup
- #product-management
- #productivity
800+ targetable keywords in all (daily.dev Media Kit 2.0, August 2026 — targeting).
Where engineering leaders and CTOs get their news
The sources that publish most on these tags, ranked by followers on daily.dev.
- 1
DEV
- 2
gitconnected
- 3
Tech Lead Digest
- 4
The Serious CTO
- 5
sean goedecke
- 6
Hacker News
What they also read
Tags on the same recent posts, as a share of them. Worth adding to a campaign.
- #ai-agents17%
- #ai-coding11%
- #ai7%
- #company-culture5%
- #llm5%
- #mcp4%
Tags, sources and co-reading: daily.dev public API snapshot.
How do you reach engineering leaders and CTOs?
Developers are the audience that taught the industry to block ads. The way in is not a louder interruption; it is the reading they chose, in the place they open every day. That is why daily.dev Ads exists: to help brands earn a place in that reading, week after week.
- 13K+
- companies whose developers read daily.dev
- 800+
- targetable stacks and topics
- 2,000+
- content sources in the feed
Written by the daily.dev Ads team, which plans and runs every campaign on the platform. Sources on the audience overview.
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They still read as engineers, so skip boardroom language.
Engineering leaders read the same technical posts as their team. Publish with the technical specifics intact and add the outcome; executive vocabulary reads as a message from another industry.
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The recommendation comes from below, so reach the team too.
Most tools a leader buys were first tried by an engineer on their team. Publish for the stack tags and for #leadership, so your name reaches the team and the person who signs at the same time.
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One outcome they can defend beats five features.
A leader forwards a page to a finance partner before signing. Publish one measured outcome with the team size and the period, on a page worth forwarding.
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Answer build versus buy in public.
Every leader has an engineer who says the team could build it. Write about the engineer-months, the maintenance and what the team would rather be doing, and the objection is answered before the meeting.
CodeRabbit“You cannot build developer trust with agents. It needs a human.”
Juan Pablo Flores
Developer Experience
Why do developers pay attention on daily.dev?
Michael on reaching developers by adding value and showing your culture rather than selling: authenticity cannot be manufactured, and it is what earns attention.
More from the team: the developer marketing series →
What do engineering leaders and CTOs read, and what should your brand say?
A few things they read and discuss
Examples of popular posts on these tags that engineering leaders and CTOs read and talk about on daily.dev. Open any of them to join the conversation.
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12 things I miss since coding died
Manager.dev 23 143
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Stop building side projects. Nobody cares — and here's the uncomfortable math.
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AI Writes My Code Now. Here’s What I Actually Do With My Time.
Medium 8 26
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**Data-Driven vs Event-Driven Architecture: How to Pick the Right One**
SitePoint 5 113
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You should all be asking way more questions
Each post opens on daily.dev with its discussion.
What that means for your message
Your takeaways from what they discuss. Our team writes the creative with you.
- Team throughput Publish cycle time before and after, on a team of a stated size
- Retention and hiring Write about what changes in an engineer’s week, not the org chart
- Build versus buy Count the engineer-months it replaces, honestly, in a post a leader can forward
How do you target engineering leaders and CTOs on daily.dev?
Targeting is built on what developers read on daily.dev, not a self-declared profile. You set it once with your campaign manager; your plan runs it, and we optimise it every week.
- Tags
- #leadership, #career, #architecture, #startup, #product-management, #productivity, and any of the 800+ targetable keywords
- Seniority
- Junior, mid-level, senior and leadership, from on-platform activity
- Region
- Global, or by region and country
- In your plan
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- Your verified company page
- Your posts in the feed of senior and leadership readers
- Your logo on the daily.dev homepage
- A weekly report and a campaign manager
- Creative
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Our team works with you to shape, finish and test your creative, so it reads like the posts around it.
Creative specs for every placement
Pick a size
Same work in every size. The size sets your reach.
Explore my options →Prices are quoted per company. See how plans work →
Where else can you reach engineering leaders and CTOs?
Where engineering leaders and CTOs can be reached with paid media, and what each channel is good at. Most teams combine two or three; a plan here is the always-on part.
| Channel | Format | Target by stack | How you buy | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Your verified company page, your posts in their feed, the newsletter they chose, the homepage | Yes: #leadership, #architecture and related tags, leadership and senior seniority, region | Managed monthly plan | Building a brand developers follow, every week, with creative and reporting done for you |
| Leadership newsletters (Software Lead Weekly, The Pragmatic Engineer) | One sponsor slot per issue | By list | Per issue | Launch-week spikes |
| LinkedIn Ads | Sponsored posts and message ads | By job title, company and self-declared skills | Self-serve | Reaching managers and buyers by title |
| LeadDev and QCon | Booths and talks | By event | Sponsorship packages | Enterprise relationships |
| CTO communities and peer groups | Sponsored sessions and community partnerships | By community | Sponsorship packages | Peer recommendation |
| Hacker News | Show HN and Launch HN posts | None; the front page decides | Organic | One-off launches with a technical story |
Compare daily.dev with
- Format
- Your verified company page, your posts in their feed, the newsletter they chose, the homepage One sponsor slot per issueSponsored posts and message adsBooths and talksSponsored sessions and community partnershipsShow HN and Launch HN posts
- Target by stack
- Yes: #leadership, #architecture and related tags, leadership and senior seniority, region By listBy job title, company and self-declared skillsBy eventBy communityNone; the front page decides
- How you buy
- Managed monthly plan Per issueSelf-serveSponsorship packagesSponsorship packagesOrganic
- Best for
- Building a brand developers follow, every week, with creative and reporting done for you Launch-week spikesReaching managers and buyers by titleEnterprise relationshipsPeer recommendationOne-off launches with a technical story
Channel facts from each channel's own public pages, October 2026. Prices are not compared.
What do teams build with engineering leaders and CTOs on daily.dev?
Build your brand with them
Show up every day in the reading engineering leaders and CTOs chose, with your posts, releases and point of view, so yours is the name they know when they pick a tool.
Grow a community around your product
Your verified company page is where engineering leaders and CTOs follow you, discuss your posts and come back for your next release.
Strengthen your employer brand
Share engineering stories, culture and open roles with engineering leaders and CTOs where they already discover tools and ideas.
Brands building with developers on daily.dev
Brands building with developers on daily.dev
Google, AWS, Google Cloud, Cursor, Vanta, Zoho, Atlassian, Notion, Okta, Sentry, Datadog, JetBrains, Postman, Snyk, ClickHouse, Edge Impulse, RevenueCat, QA Wolf, TigerData, PostHog, LaunchDarkly, Neo4j, Temporal, Sonar, Appwrite, dbt Labs, Retool, Pulumi, CodeRabbit, Windsurf, OpenRouter, Bright Data, Stream, Postmark, Novu, context.dev
Guides on reaching engineering leaders and CTOs
- How CTOs and VPs of engineering evaluate developer tools
- Marketing to engineering managers
- Target developers by programming language: a marketer’s guide
- Tech stack targeting: reaching developers by the tools they use
- Best developer advertising platforms
- Developer marketing platforms compared: the channel mix
All guides: developer marketing resources →
Advertising to engineering leaders and CTOs: your questions
Pick a plan. We reach
engineering leaders and CTOs for you.
Tell us what you sell and the regions you need. We come back with a plan size, the reach it buys and a quote.
Other audiences: Backend developers SRE and platform engineers Security engineers All audiences →