Hire a VP of Engineering
The hire that either buys you a year of focus or costs you one.
Stage fit decides this hire more than anything on the CV
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
A VP of Engineering at forty people is doing a different job to one at four hundred. The first builds the team, sets the hiring bar, still reviews code occasionally and absorbs the chaos. The second runs directors and a process that already exists.
Founders usually search for the second and get hurt by it. The impressive CV comes from a large company, and the habits that made it impressive there, layers, planning cycles, delegation, are the wrong instincts at forty people.
The signal you actually want is a stage transition: someone who took a team from ten to fifty and lived through what breaks in between. That is a specific experience, and it does not show up in a title search.
How the agent runs a VP of Engineering search
It maps the stage, not the title
Headcount when they joined and when they left, at each company. The shape of that curve is the single most predictive thing about this hire.
It reads how they think about people
Writing on hiring, team structure, incident culture and promotion. Almost every strong engineering leader has published some of it.
Outreach that is honest about the mess
Senior leaders have heard the polished pitch. The message says what is actually broken, what you want them to own, and what you are not going to change.
Screening on the hard decisions
Your questions go out early: the person they should have let go sooner, and the process they removed rather than added.
Questions.
Answered.
Broadly, a CTO owns technical direction and a VP owns the team and delivery. With a technical founder in place, the VP hire is usually the right one.
At under fifty people, the strongest ones can and occasionally do, though it should not be their main output. The agent reads for whether the ability is recent.
By searching on stage rather than scale. A VP from a 2,000-person company who has never built a team from ten is usually the wrong fit, however good the brand looks.
Longer than an IC search. Senior leaders move slowly, and the pool of people with the exact stage transition you want is small.
Find your VP of Engineering.
Tell us your headcount and what is breaking. The agent will find people who have been through that exact transition.