CTO-Led Technical & Leadership Interviews
I’ve hired as a developer, team lead, EM, head of engineering, and CTO. Now I bring that experience directly to your team’s most important hires.
500+ interviews across every seat on the way up, and each one taught me something the last didn’t cover. Most interview processes are built by someone who’s only sat in one of those seats.
I’ve spent 16+ years building and scaling engineering teams at startups and scale-ups, and led the technical side of 4 products that went on to generate over €25M in annual revenue. In that time I’ve made good hires and bad ones, and I know exactly where standard interview processes fall apart.
Alongside my work as a CTO, I now bring that experience directly to a small number of companies for their most important hires.
Built for the hires that are hardest to get wrong
This isn’t a replacement for your whole hiring pipeline, and it isn’t built for volume. It’s a final layer for a small number of roles a year, senior engineers, engineering managers, and technical leadership hires, especially at startups and scale-ups, where I’ve spent my whole career and where one bad senior hire can cost you a year.
If your pipeline is high-volume and early-stage, this probably isn’t the right fit. If you’re down to your final few candidates for a role that really matters, it is.
Why the process is breaking
Most interview processes test one thing: whether a candidate can solve a coding problem under time pressure. That was never the whole job.
- Coding tests and take-homes measure whether someone can solve a puzzle, not whether they can architect a system, make it scale, or communicate and lead once they’re in the seat.
- Rigid, academic screening filters out engineers who’d thrive on the job, and lets through “paper tigers” who ace the theory but can’t collaborate or ship real code under pressure.
- AI raises the stakes on all of it. Anyone can generate code now, so the real question is whether a candidate understands what comes back, can debug it, question it, and scale it, or whether they’re just prompting in a loop. Most formats weren’t built to tell the difference.
Your team ends up paying for it twice. Hours go into grading take-home assignments, and your strongest candidates drop out of the pipeline because they don’t want to do them.
What you’re paying for
You’re not paying for another test, another algorithm, or another score. You’re paying for a CTO’s direct judgment on the one hire you can’t afford to get wrong, real pair programming, real architectural conversation, and a clear recommendation in writing.
One session, built around how the job actually works
Your team doesn’t have to download code, review pull requests, or run screenings. They talk to the people who’ve already cleared the highest bar you have.
I replace screening tests and take-home assignments with one live, three-hour session, tailored to the role.
| Focus | What I’m evaluating | |
|---|---|---|
| Hours 1-2 (Senior Engineers) | Real-world pair programming | AI is allowed. I’m not testing whether they can prompt, I’m testing whether they understand what comes back: can they debug it, is it scalable, is it performant, and can they walk me through their thinking clearly while they work. |
| Hours 1-2 (Engineering Managers) | Organizational and architectural scenarios | Team structure, scaling pain, conflict resolution, technical trade-offs, and how they communicate a hard decision to a team that won’t like it. |
| Hour 3 (All candidates) | System design, leadership, communication, and alignment | Can they connect technical decisions to business outcomes, think strategically about trade-offs, and explain their reasoning to someone outside engineering? Do they actually fit how your team works? |
At the end you get one document: a CTO Evaluation Memo with a clear recommendation. Not a scorecard or a checklist. My judgment, in writing.
The decision stays yours. I’m not here to replace your judgment or run your process, I’m a sharper input into the call you’re already making, from someone who’s made it many times before.