When a tech company needs a CEO, CTO, or CISO, the search usually doesn’t happen in-house. It runs through a small circle of executive recruiters who place leadership at the companies you’ve heard of.
The tech executive recruiters below are among the most established in that world, the people behind leadership hires at firms like Google, Airbnb, Snowflake, and DoorDash.
They split roughly into two camps: Silicon Valley and startup specialists, and the Wall Street crowd who staff quant and fintech leadership. Here’s who they are and what they place.
Top tech executive search firms
Most C-level searches run through firms rather than individual recruiters. These are the names that dominate tech leadership hiring. Several have partners profiled below:
| Agency | Known for |
|---|---|
|
Riviera PartnersSan Francisco | The search firm venture investors call for VP Engineering and CTO hires. Its co-founder is profiled below. |
|
Daversa PartnersNew York | Builds leadership benches for venture-backed startups. You will find its founder below. |
|
Korn FerryGlobal | The world’s largest executive search firm, with a technology practice spanning CIO to board hires. |
|
Heidrick & StrugglesGlobal | Big-five executive search with a deep technology-officers practice. |
|
Egon ZehnderGlobal | Partner-owned search firm known for CEO, board and CTO work. |
|
Heller SearchUS | CIO and CTO search specialist. Its CEO appears below. |
|
EchoGlobalLondon · Tallinn · Lviv | That is us. We run senior and lead-level engineering searches across the Eastern European market. |
The executive recruiters worth briefing
A firm opens doors, but you work with a partner. These are the people worth contacting directly:
- Andy Price
- Paul Daversa
- Gad Azuelos
- Katherine Graham Shannon
- Joe Riggione
- Henry Man
- Nick Steiner
- Alan Blum
- Giancarlo Hirsch
- Art Hopkins
- Michael Stover
- James M. Citrin
- Shawn Banerji
- Martha Heller
- Andy Legg
- Ben Hodzic
- Neil Price
- Ali Behnam
⚡️Filling a CTO or VP Engineering seat? Talk to EchoGlobal about executive search.
Andy Price
🇺🇸 American
Andy is a Managing Partner at SPMB (Schweichler Price Mullarkey & Barry), one of the West Coast’s biggest independent tech search firms, and a big reason it bills itself as “the #1 executive search firm serving the technology market.”
He oversees hundreds of C-level searches a year, and the firm tallies its placements at over $1 trillion in created market value through IPOs and M&A. The names tell the story: Snowflake, Google Cloud, Airbnb, and a long list of VC-backed companies.
- Linkedin: Andy Price
Paul Daversa
🇺🇸 American
Paul founded and runs Daversa Partners, the search firm the venture world calls when a startup needs its first real leadership bench, which is why he’s been tagged “the headhunter of Silicon Valley.”
He’s built C-suites at Robinhood, Instacart, Square, DoorDash, Snapchat, Dataminr, and Airtable, among others. One number captures the scale: executives he placed over the past three years have earned more than $2 billion in combined compensation.
- Linkedin: Paul Daversa
Gad Azuelos
🇫🇷 French
Gad runs technology search across EMEA as Korn Ferry‘s Global Technology Industry Leader, working out of Paris and leading a bench of senior partners across Europe.
His focus is C-suite tech placements and the broader talent strategy behind digital-transformation programs, and he’s known for guiding big telecom and tech organizations through messy leadership transitions.
- Linkedin: Gad Azuelos
- X (Twitter): @GadSalomon
Katherine Graham Shannon
sdfsdfsdfsd
🇺🇸 American
Katie is a San Francisco partner at Heidrick & Struggles and co-leads its Technology & AI Officers Practice. Across 20+ years at the firm she’s placed hundreds of CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs, increasingly in newer areas like AI and cybersecurity.
She works across industries, including private-equity portfolio companies, and turns up on panels about how the CIO and CXO roles keep shifting.
- Linkedin: Katie Graham Shannon
- X (Twitter): @Kgrahamshannon
Joe Riggione
The future of executive search is not just about who you know—it’s about what you know and how you use data to uncover potential others miss.
🇺🇸 American
Joe co-founded and co-leads True, which he’s grown since 2012 into a top-10 global search firm built around high-growth tech and PE-backed companies.
A recruiter turned entrepreneur, he’s pushed True toward a data-driven way of finding “unicorn” talent, expanded it worldwide, and launched talent platforms alongside the core search business.
He also writes on leadership and hiring, including the piece Finding Hidden Leadership Potential, which keeps him visible in modern tech recruiting.
- Linkedin: Joe Riggione
Henry Man
🇺🇸 American
Henry co-founded and is Managing Partner of Candela Search, a boutique tech executive search firm that works both sides of the Atlantic.
He’s been at it since the dot-com boom, 20+ years of placing senior technology and digital leaders, with a particular line in CIO and CTO hires for companies in the middle of big changes.
Candela’s pull in both Silicon Valley and Europe’s tech hubs tracks with the network he’s built (and the 80+ countries he’s logged along the way).
- Linkedin: Henry Man
Nick Steiner
🇦🇺 Australian
Nick heads Egon Zehnder‘s Digital, Technology & Communications Practice across Asia Pacific from Sydney, advising on CEO succession and tech leadership. He places CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and CMOs both at tech companies and at traditional firms going through digital change.
The credibility comes partly from having been there: he was a media COO before recruiting, so he’s lived the disruption he now hires leaders to handle.
- Linkedin: Nick Steiner
- X (Twitter): @NickSteiner_SYD
Alan Blum
🇺🇸 American
Alan runs the global technology practice at Options Group from New York, and he’s spent 15+ years there on the financial-technology end: trading systems, quantitative analytics, fintech engineering.
He’s a known quantity in quant-finance recruiting, the person Wall Street trading firms call for hard-to-fill CTO and engineering roles, with one peer telling Business Insider that trading-systems technology is “his bread and butter.”
He came to it from inside finance, having worked at DLJ before recruiting.
- Linkedin: Alan Blum
Giancarlo Hirsch
🇺🇸 American
Giancarlo is a Managing Director at Glocomms (part of Phaidon International) and the person a lot of companies call for cybersecurity leadership.
Over eight years there he built and now leads a team that places CISOs, security architects, and tech-risk executives across finance, fintech, and insurance.
As firms consolidate their security functions, he coaches candidates to lead with the real scope of what they’ve owned, and stays close to where the next wave of security-leadership demand is coming from.
- Linkedin: Giancarlo Hirsch
Art Hopkins
🇺🇸 American
Art leads the Global Technology Officers Practice at RRA and co-leads its Diversity & Inclusion Practice, a combination that shows in his work, which runs from CTO, CIO, and Chief Data Officer searches to placing the first Chief Inclusion Officer at a major e-commerce company.
He was a tech CEO before he was a recruiter, which gives him a client’s-eye read on what these roles actually require, and he speaks regularly on how they’re changing.
- Linkedin: Art Hopkins
Michael Stover
🇺🇸 American
Michael leads the Americas practice at The Omerta Group with 26 years recruiting tech and quantitative talent for financial institutions. He was a talent-acquisition executive inside Citadel and UBS before this, and now places trading-technology leaders and CTOs into multi-strategy hedge funds and trading shops.
Having watched Wall Street move from the dot-com era to today’s AI arms race, he describes a genuine race among quant funds to turn data and tech into an edge, both in performance and in who they can hire.
- Linkedin: Michael Stover
James M. Citrin
🇺🇸 American
James leads Spencer Stuart‘s North American CEO Practice and is about as close to a household name as tech headhunting has.
In 25+ years there he’s run 775+ CEO, board, and top-management searches, many for media and technology companies, and placed chief executives at Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, PayPal, Cisco, and Hulu.
He’s also a best-selling author on careers and leadership, and clients lean on his read of which candidates combine capability, credibility, and what he calls “attractability” for the most visible roles.
- Linkedin: James Citrin
- X (Twitter): @Jamescitrin
Shawn Banerji
🇺🇸 American
Shawn is Managing Partner of Caldwell’s Data, Digital & Technology Leaders Practice, and after two decades in search (much of it at Russell Reynolds) he specializes in what he calls “catalyst” leaders, the CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and CISOs brought in to reset how a business creates value.
He’s active outside the day job too: a board advisor at Columbia’s technology-management center, a contributor at the MIT CIO Symposium, and a steady advocate for diversity in tech leadership.
- Linkedin: Shawn Banerji
Martha Heller
🇺🇸 American
Martha is CEO of Heller Search and one of the better-known names in CIO and CTO recruiting.
Beyond placing hundreds of technology leaders, she’s shaped how companies think about the job: she wrote The CIO Paradox and Be the Business, spent years as a CIO.com columnist, and founded the CIO Executive Council.
The result is a boutique that Fortune 500 CIOs treat as a first call for senior IT hires.
- Linkedin: Martha Heller
- X (Twitter): @marthaheller
Andy Legg
🇬🇧 British
Andy is a Director at Riviera Partners, helping run its quantitative-technology and AI practice. His niche is narrow and lucrative: placing machine-learning engineers and quant technologists into hedge funds and fintech, work he’s been doing for a decade.
He’s effectively in the business of moving “brain share” from Big Tech into finance, and got an early start, placing his first ML engineer at a hedge fund back in 2013.
Stints recruiting in-house at Point72 and Two Sigma sharpen his read on that finance-meets-AI intersection.
- Linkedin: Andy Legg
Ben Hodzic
🇺🇸 American
Ben is Managing Director and head of Selby Jennings in North America, a financial-services recruiting firm, where he places software engineers, AI and ML specialists, and quant developers into top banks and hedge funds.
As Wall Street’s appetite for AI talent spiked, he’s been busy recruiting across the whole ladder, from senior engineering leaders down to specialized quant researchers, and has become one of the Street’s preferred headhunters for advanced AI and data skills.
- Linkedin: Ben Hodzic
Neil Price
🇬🇧 British
Neil is a Partner at Page Executive working on senior technology, digital, data, and cyber leadership appointments from London.
He partners with boards on the mandates that sit where technology leadership meets transformation, CIO, CTO, CDO, and cyber roles, drawing on a recruiting background that runs across digital transformation, AI and data, ERP, and security.
- Linkedin: Neil Price
Ali Behnam
🇺🇸 American
Ali co-founded Riviera Partners, the search firm venture investors call when a portfolio company needs a VP of Engineering or CTO, and has run executive searches there for more than two decades.
His client sheet includes Uber, LinkedIn, Twitter, ServiceNow, DoorDash and GitHub. Before Riviera he co-founded PeopleMover, a workforce management company acquired by Opus360, and started out in consulting at Accenture.
Riviera occupies a specific niche on this list: almost nobody else has placed as many engineering leaders into venture-backed companies specifically.
- Linkedin: Ali Behnam
Wrap Up
These elite tech executive recruiters have redefined how top talent is sourced. But working with them isn’t always easy: demand is high and fees can be steep.
A practical alternative is hiring great tech executive experts through EchoGlobal, where we combine deep industry insight and extensive networks to efficiently connect you with the right talent.
Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top professionals. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.
