100%
of retained searches filled — every one since 2015
Home · CTO search New York
New York CityCTO search for New York's backed scaleups.
Retained CTO, VP Engineering and Chief AI Officer search for VC and PE-backed AI, FinTech and HealthTech companies headquartered in New York City. One market, one discipline, and a record we'll show you before you commit to anything.
96%
of 50+ placements since 2015 still in role at 12 months
30 days
typical time to a secured hire from engagement
12 months
replacement guarantee as standard, whatever the reason
Measured across 50+ retained searches Edison Hill has run since 2015.
The brief
Why NYC technology leadership is its own market.
A CTO search in New York is not a generic technology search run in a different postcode. The candidates who matter are already known to their peers, mostly not looking, and evaluating you as hard as you're evaluating them. The people who can be persuaded to move are moving for the problem, the equity and the investor behind it — in roughly that order.
That is a network business, not a database business. It is also why a contingency recruiter, paid only if their candidate happens to land, is structurally the wrong tool: their incentive is volume across many clients at once. Yours is one appointment, made correctly, once.
Where we're concentrated
- AI — including Chief AI Officer appointments, where the role is often being defined for the first time
- FinTech — regulated, high-stakes platforms where the technical bar and the governance bar are both real
- HealthTech — where domain fluency is not optional and the wrong hire costs quarters, not weeks
The roles
- Chief Technology Officer — first-time and successor appointments
- VP Engineering — scaling delivery under investor timelines
- Chief AI Officer — a new seat at the table for most boards
- Director of Engineering and the leadership layer beneath the CTO
How we de-risk it
Four steps, run the same way every time.
The consistency is what produces the number. Skip a step and the 96% is just a claim.
01
Behavioural job survey
We get every hiring stakeholder aligned on what “right” actually means — before a single candidate is approached.
02
Deep market mapping
The whole addressable market, mapped and screened — not a shortlist drawn from whoever happens to be looking.
03
Competency-based screening
Structured, video-based assessment against the agreed brief, so every candidate is measured the same way.
04
Onboarding & retention
The search doesn’t end at the offer. It ends when the hire is embedded — which is why they’re still there at 12 months.
Straight answers
Hiring a CTO in New York.
How do I hire a CTO after a Series B?
The failure mode is almost never the market — it’s that the founders, the board and the lead investor each had a different CTO in mind. We start with a behavioural job survey across every stakeholder to settle that in writing, then map the New York market against the agreed brief. From engagement, a secured hire typically lands inside 30 days.
Do you only work with New York companies?
New York is home base — it’s where our network runs deepest. But we work with companies wherever they’re headquartered: across the US, in London and the UK, and beyond. If the role is senior technology leadership, geography is rarely the obstacle — start the conversation and we’ll tell you straight if we’re not the right fit.
What roles do you search for?
CTO, VP Engineering and Chief AI Officer, plus the senior technology leadership around them. We deliberately do not cover every technology role — the concentration is the point.
What does a retained CTO search cost?
Retained search is priced per assignment and depends on the seniority and difficulty of the brief. The 15-minute call is where we work out whether it’s the right approach for your role at all — we’ll tell you if it isn’t.
Hiring a CTO in New York?
Fifteen confidential minutes on the role and the market. No pitch deck.