VP of Engineering Search

VP of Engineering searches carry a burden that most other executive searches don't: the hiring committee includes engineers. Often senior engineers. Sometimes the very people the hire will lead.

This changes the evaluation dynamic in a specific way. The technical bar for the candidate is real — they need to be credible to people who will push back. But the evaluation criteria that engineers naturally reach for — depth of technical knowledge, specific framework experience, architectural opinions — are often not the criteria that predict whether the hire will succeed in the job. A VP of Engineering who can win a technical debate with the staff engineers is not necessarily one who can set and execute a 12-month engineering roadmap while managing stakeholder expectations and rebuilding team culture after two years of shipping under pressure.

The brief that doesn't resolve this tension produces a search that generates good candidates and rejects them for the wrong reasons.

The two jobs that both carry the title

VP of Engineering means different things at different company stages, and the difference matters more here than in almost any other function.

At an early-stage company — ten to thirty engineers — the VP of Engineering is frequently a hands-on technical leader who also manages. They are reviewing code, making architectural decisions, hiring the next five engineers, and running the engineering organisation. This person needs to be a strong individual contributor who has started to build leadership skills. Most VPs of Engineering from 200-person engineering organisations are not this person and don't want to be.

At a growth-stage company — fifty to two hundred engineers — the VP of Engineering is a manager of managers. They are running team leads and engineering managers, not individual contributors. They are translating business priorities into engineering roadmaps, managing cross-functional dependencies, and building the systems that allow the engineering organisation to scale without quality and velocity collapsing. This requires a different set of skills from the hands-on technical leader, and the two profiles are often not interchangeable.

A brief that doesn't specify which of these two jobs it is describing will attract both profiles and produce an evaluation process that can't make a decision.

What engineering candidates evaluate

Strong VP of Engineering candidates evaluate the opportunity with more information-gathering rigour than almost any other candidate type. They want to understand the current technical architecture, the state of the engineering process, the composition of the existing team, the ratio of technical debt to new feature work, and the product roadmap for the next twelve months.

They ask because they know that the engineering leadership role is largely defined by what they inherit. A VP of Engineering who joins a company with a well-structured team, clear processes, and manageable technical debt has a different job than one who joins a company where deployment takes six hours, the on-call rotation is burning people out, and the product roadmap is being rewritten quarterly.

Searches that can't answer these questions fluently lose candidates at the interest stage. The right person engages, asks three questions, and goes quiet. The search firm reports low candidate interest. The actual problem is that the opportunity isn't being presented with enough operational specificity to make a strong candidate want to learn more.

What four months open looks like from the inside

A fintech startup came to Majhi Group with a Head of Engineering seat that had been open for four months. Seed-funded, growing, with an internal talent function that was still being built. The role was critical — engineering velocity was the business — and the company had been unable to close a candidate.

The problem wasn't candidate scarcity. The fintech-and-engineering intersection has real talent in it. The problem was how the opportunity was being presented. Candidates were getting a job description. They were not getting a clear picture of what they would inherit, what the architecture looked like, what the mandate was, or why the company was worth the career risk.

We rebuilt the positioning before doing any outreach. The approach was straightforward: full transparency about the company's stage, its growth trajectory, and what the engineering challenge actually was. Candidates who received this responded differently. They engaged with specificity, asked the right questions, and moved through evaluation faster. The pipeline hit 122 qualified candidates. The role closed.

The lesson is consistent: VP of Engineering candidates are evaluating whether the company deserves them, not just whether they qualify for the role. The search that treats information as a selling tool — parcelled out strategically — loses to the search that leads with clarity.

What closes the VP Engineering search

Document the technical context before outreach begins. Stack, team composition, current velocity, key technical challenges, and the specific mandate for the first six months. Outreach built on this gets responses from the people you actually want.

Majhi Group runs retained VP of Engineering searches. 30–45 days against the 65–90 day industry median. The search assessment focuses on whether the brief is currently constructed to close.

If a VP Engineering search has been running for more than eight weeks, request an assessment.