CTO executive search

The title chief technology officer covers three jobs that rarely sit in one person: the architect who decides what gets built on, the engineering leader who runs forty people, and the technologist who talks to customers and the board. A CTO search goes wrong when the company wants all three and interviews for one. Deciding which two matter most, and who covers the third, is the brief.

The UK market charges 25 to 33 per cent of first-year salary for retained search and 15 to 25 per cent for contingency. What sits inside that number is set out openly, which is unusual in this market and deliberate.

What changes when the seat is the CTO

Architect, builder or manager, and the company usually needs a different one than it had

The founding CTO who wrote the first version is often the wrong person to run a sixty-person engineering organisation, and the engineering manager from a large company is often the wrong person to make a platform decision that will last a decade. The search has to name the job: is it a technical decision-maker with a strong head of engineering underneath, or an organisational leader with principal engineers to lean on? The candidate pools barely overlap.

Equity is a larger share of the package than for any other seat

Engineering leaders in UK scale-ups expect meaningful equity, typically a larger grant than the CFO or CMO at the same stage, and candidates coming from well-funded companies may be walking away from unvested options. Know the pool, the strike price and whether the company will consider a signing payment to cover forfeited equity before anybody is approached, because the question comes up in the first conversation.

Technical assessment has to happen and most boards cannot do it

A founder without an engineering background cannot evaluate an architecture decision in an interview, and a panel of the current engineers has an interest in the outcome. The search needs an independent technical assessor, a former CTO or a principal engineer from outside, who meets the final candidates and reports back on judgement rather than on trivia.

The existing engineering team will decide whether the hire survives

Senior engineers leave when a new CTO arrives badly, and they leave within six months. Candidates should meet the senior engineers before an offer, and the engineers should be told why the hire is being made. A CTO parachuted in above a team that was not consulted spends the first year rehiring the people who left.

The process, where it differs

Name the job

Which two of architect, builder and manager the seat is, and who holds the third, written down before the market is touched.

Map

CTOs and VPs of engineering in companies one stage ahead, and principal engineers with a leadership track record, across the stacks that matter to this company.

Approach

With the technical problem stated honestly, including the debt. Engineering leaders are persuaded by an interesting problem and repelled by a brochure.

Assess

An independent technical assessor on the final two, a session with the senior engineers, and a review of something the candidate actually shipped.

Equity, vesting and any make-whole for forfeited options agreed alongside base, with the board's approval already in hand.

What to ask a search firm

Which kind of CTO do you think this company needs, and what would you put underneath them?
Who assesses technical judgement in your process, and what do they look for?
How do you approach engineering leaders who are not looking, and what response rate do you see?
What equity are CTOs accepting at our stage this year?
How do you handle a candidate leaving unvested options behind?

Where it goes wrong

Interviewing for the architect and hiring the manager, or the reverse
Letting the current engineers run the technical assessment of their future boss
Describing the codebase as cleaner than it is
Treating equity as a detail to settle after the offer
Hiring above the senior engineers without telling them why

When a search is the wrong instrument

A company with a strong head of engineering that needs architectural judgement a day or two a week does not need a full-time chief technology officer; it needs a fractional CTO who makes the platform decisions and leaves the running to the person already doing it. The permanent search is right when the seat is the organisation itself.

Common questions

How long does a CTO search take?

Ten to fourteen weeks to an accepted offer for a retained search, with the technical assessment adding a week or two. Notice periods for UK engineering leaders are typically three months. Companies that start a search when the founding CTO has already resigned run the organisation leaderless for half a year, which is why fractional cover is common.

What does a CTO executive search cost in the UK?

25 to 33 per cent of first-year earnings for retained work, the same band as other C-suite seats, on a base that for a scale-up CTO commonly sits above the CFO's. Equity does not normally count towards the fee base, which is one of the details to agree in the engagement letter.

Should our first CTO come from a big company or a startup?

From a company one stage ahead of yours, whichever label it carries. A leader from a thousand-person engineering organisation often cannot operate without the support functions; a founding CTO from a ten-person startup often has not managed managers. The right background is the one that has solved your next problem recently.

What is the difference between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?

In UK scale-ups the CTO owns technical direction, architecture and the technology story to customers and the board; the VP of Engineering owns delivery, hiring and the engineering organisation. Many companies need both by sixty engineers. A search for one should say whether the other exists.

Two ways in

Permanent, or the part-time version first

Retained search runs a full-time appointment end to end. Operator Search answers the same brief fractionally in five business days, which is usually the faster way to find out whether the seat is real. Or browse the bench and approach somebody direct at no cost.

How to Hire a CTO: Scope, Process, Equity and CostDeciding which kind of CTO the company needs, where to find them, how to assess technical judgement without an engineer on the board, and what the hire costs loaded.