MitchelLake · The CTO and VP Engineering seats
CTO and VP Engineering Executive Search
The CTO owns the technology the company runs on and the story it tells investors about it; the VP of Engineering owns the people who build it. MitchelLake appoints both, and advises on the order, for technology companies from Series B to the enterprise.
What the seat does at Series B to D, and in a scale-up
At Series B the CTO is often still the founder who wrote the first version, and the hire the board asks for is a VP of Engineering who can double the team without halving its velocity: hiring, delivery cadence, platform reliability. By Series C and D the CTO seat separates again. Architecture, security and the technology case to investors sit with the CTO; the VP Engineering runs the organisation.
In a scale-up the two hires are frequently made within a year of each other, and the order matters. A VP Engineering hired under a founder-CTO needs a mandate for the organisation that the founder has agreed to give up; a CTO hired over an existing engineering leader needs a brief that is about the platform and the market, not a second manager for the same team.
What the market is doing
In October 2026, the last settled month on the wire, 21 strategic-hiring signals named a CTO or engineering leadership seat, up from 9 in September 2026; 1,445 product launches were recorded against 829.
- CTO & Engineering: 31 of 1,256 executive appointments in October 2026 (2.5%), +0.6 points on the month before.
Live signal wire, settled calendar months only. The appointment mix is the Talent Market Index monthly movement rail; the wire itself is at strategic hiring and product launches.
Comparable mandate
We have run this search for this kind of role.