Most CTO briefs list technologies. The stronger question is whether a candidate has taken a team and a system through 10x growth — because that is what breaks, and that is what cannot be learned on the job.
The gap job descriptions miss
A list of languages and frameworks tells you what someone has touched, not what they have survived. Scaling exposes different muscles entirely: architecture decisions that hold under load, hiring pipelines that keep quality up while headcount doubles, and the judgement to know which technical debt to service and which to carry.
Engineering leaders rarely apply
Strong CTOs and VPs of Engineering are almost always employed and not browsing job boards. A search built on inbound applications systematically misses the strongest candidates — you see who is available, not who is best.
Reaching them means mapping the market: identifying who has done the specific thing you need, then making a credible, confidential approach.
What we look for
- Proven scaling experience — ideally through the stage you are entering, not the one you left
- A hiring and retention record — strong engineers follow leaders they respect
- Board and finance fluency — a CTO who cannot explain trade-offs commercially will struggle at the top table
- Architectural judgement over technical depth alone — the best decisions are often about what not to build
Builder or maintainer
Both are valuable; they are not interchangeable. A maintainer keeps a mature platform stable and efficient. A builder takes an early system through the growth that would otherwise break it. Hiring one when you needed the other is the most expensive CTO mistake, and it usually only becomes visible a year in.
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