Principal, Executive Search

You run retained executive searches for the leaders who decide what a company becomes: COO, CFO, General Counsel, Head of Manufacturing, VP and C-suite roles across deep tech and industrials. These are flagship mandates. The client is often a founder or a board, the stakes are high, and the search has to be run with discretion, rigor, and genuine strategic understanding of where the company is going.

You will carry mandates with the founder and, over time, own them outright. You are a peer to the executives you assess and to the clients you advise.

• Lead retained searches from written mandate through close. Begin with the strategic context, the operating thesis, the succession or scale risk, and the real definition of success, then build the search around it.
• Run stakeholder interviews with founders, boards, and investors, and produce the written mandate that anchors the search.
• Map the executive market from scratch, calibrated to the company's next stage rather than its current one.
• Conduct senior, direct, confidential outreach and assessment. Evaluate for capability, trajectory, and cultural and soft-skill fit, with the judgment to know when to walk away from the wrong person.
• Manage compensation benchmarking, offer strategy, and the close, including complex packages with cash, equity, and incentive structures.
• Handle confidential client context with absolute discretion. Honor off-limits without exception.
• Advise clients honestly, including when the honest answer is not what they want to hear.

• 7 or more years in executive search, leadership advisory, or a closely related field, with retained search experience strongly preferred.
• A track record placing senior leaders, ideally in deep tech, hardware, energy, defense, industrials, or other technically demanding sectors.
• The presence and credibility to advise founders and boards as a peer.
• Mature judgment on people. You can read an executive's true strengths and risks, not just their narrative.
• Discretion, integrity, and a bias toward doing it right over doing it fast.

• An existing network across deep-tech founders, operators, and investors.
• Experience with regulated or dual-use sectors where compliance, clearance, or export-control fluency matters.
• Comfort with fixed-fee, alignment-first retained models.