The roles we are hired for, again and again
Foundry Search has extensive experience with CTO, CPO, VP of AI, CIO, and CISO roles, and across the senior Engineering, Product, and Design leadership layer beneath them.
Engineering Leadership
The hardest engineering hires are not about technology. They are about whether a leader can hold architecture, delivery, and thirty careers in their head at once — and whether the organization they are joining will let them. We assess for the specific inflection you are at: first executive, rebuild, scale, or turnaround.
Product Leadership
Product titles travel badly between companies. A CPO at a founder-led company and a CPO at a PE-backed platform business share a title and almost nothing else. We spend the calibration week working out which version of the job you are hiring for before a single name goes on a list.
Design Leadership
Design leadership is the layer most often hired badly, because the people hiring it rarely have design backgrounds. We help you separate craft from organizational range, and give you a slate you can evaluate on both.
AI & Data Leadership
The most competitive leadership market in the Bay Area, and the one where titles are least reliable. Real AI leadership experience is still rare enough that it has to be found deliberately, one conversation at a time, rather than sourced from a keyword search.
Technology Operations & Security
CIO and CISO searches carry a different weight: the board is watching, the risk is asymmetric, and the shortlist is small. These searches are run quietly, with references that go well beyond the names a candidate volunteers.
Industries and stage
We work across most major industry verticals, and across stage — venture-backed, private equity–backed, and public companies — throughout San Francisco, the Peninsula, Silicon Valley, the East Bay, and increasingly for Bay Area companies hiring remote executives nationally.
Tell us about the role.
Even the ones that do not have a title yet.