Most founders use one search firm for a VP of Engineering and a Head of Product. That looks like one decision. It is two, and running them together is how you end up with a strong engineering hire and a product leader who lasts eleven months.
Engineering leadership and product leadership sit next to each other on an org chart and behave nothing alike in a search. An engineering mandate rewards a partner who can read architecture. A product mandate rewards a different judgment: whether a candidate genuinely owned a roadmap and its commercial consequences, or was a very senior project manager with a good title. Firms good at both halves are rare. Firms that will cheerfully take the mandate for both are everywhere.
At Olofsson & Company we run product and engineering leadership searches out of Singapore, across APAC and globally. Our proprietary AI platform builds a full market universe in 48 hours, which is how we get to an average time-to-shortlist of seven days at a 93% offer acceptance rate.[1] What follows is the honest field: ten firms that place product and engineering leadership for AI and technology companies, what each one is actually built for, and how to work out which fits the mandate in front of you.
The 10 firms at a glance
| Firm | Where the APAC weight sits | P&E roles they are built for | How they work | Best fit when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Olofsson & Company | Singapore HQ, APAC and global delivery | CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, CPO, Head of Product at AI and tech companies | AI market mapping plus specialist consultants; advisory, interim and search | You need product-fluent technical leadership fast, with APAC work pass reality built into the shortlist |
| Riviera Partners | US-centred, runs APAC mandates from outside the region | Product, software engineering, IT, AI/ML/data and cybersecurity leadership[3] | Retained, AI-ranked candidate scoring over a deep Silicon Valley network | Your talent pool is mostly US and you want the purest P&E specialist in the market |
| Heidrick & Struggles | Global, Singapore CBD | Enterprise CTO and CPO, plus scale-up technology leadership | Retained, milestone-staged | You want a global brand that will still take a growth-stage mandate |
| Korn Ferry | Global, large Singapore presence | Enterprise technology and product leadership, board level | Retained, assessment-led, heavy benchmarking data | You need defensible comp benchmarking and a board-facing process |
| Spencer Stuart | Global, Singapore office at Raffles Place[8] | C-suite technology and product, public-company CTO | Retained, partner-led | The mandate is a public-company CTO or a board seat |
| Egon Zehnder | Global, Singapore office | CTO, CPO, succession and leadership assessment | Retained, fixed fee, assessment-heavy | Succession planning matters as much as the hire itself |
| Christian & Timbers | US-centred, no APAC delivery base | Cloud infrastructure, engineering architecture and AI product, inside a broad C-suite practice[9] | Retained, consultant-led technical evaluation | The role turns on deep architecture judgment and your pool is US or Europe |
| Daversa Partners | US and London centred, runs APAC mandates remotely | Venture-backed CTO and VP Engineering[5] | Retained, partner-led sprints | Your investors know them and your candidates sit in San Francisco or New York |
| Glocomms (Phaidon International) | Global, Singapore hub | Engineering and product leadership alongside cloud, data and cybersecurity desks | Contingent and retained, high-volume desks | You are filling several senior technical roles at once |
| Kerry Consulting | Singapore and Southeast Asia | Engineering, product and data hires into the local market | Local search and recruitment | You want deep Singapore market knowledge on a single appointment |
Two entries deserve a flag for opposite reasons. Riviera is the most focused product and engineering specialist on this list and, by its own description, covers product, software engineering, IT, AI/ML/data and cybersecurity.[3] It also has no APAC delivery base, which matters when your next Head of Engineering has to hold a team across Singapore, Bengaluru and Ho Chi Minh City. Glocomms sits at the other end: real regional coverage, volume desks, built for filling a technical org rather than for the single appointment that decides your next two years.
What actually separates these firms
Strip away the brand and three things decide whether a search works.
Can the firm evaluate the stack, or only the CV? A consultant who cannot hold a conversation about event-driven architecture, model serving costs or a migration off a monolith will screen on company logos and title progression. That produces shortlists full of people who were in the room when something scaled. Christian & Timbers positions itself on technology and AI search specifically, though its published case studies run heavily to CEO and CFO appointments.[9] The specialist tier is evaluated on exactly this axis.[4] Ask any firm to explain, in their own words, why your last architectural decision was hard. The answer tells you everything.
Is the network the region you actually hire in? Silicon Valley depth is genuinely valuable and completely useless if the role reports into a Singapore or Tokyo office and needs a work pass. The giants all carry regional offices. The US specialists mostly do not, and they run APAC mandates on a borrowed network.
Who carries the mandate day to day? Partner-led sprints move fast when the partner is free. Daversa's model is built that way, and its velocity depends on partner availability.[5] Ask who runs your search in week three, not who pitches it in week one.
Product leadership is the half most firms get wrong
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most firms on any "top search firms" list built their technical practice around engineering, then extended it to product because clients asked. The extension is thinner than the brochure suggests.
Product searches break differently from engineering searches. The title is unstandardised across companies, so a Head of Product at a 40-person Series A and a Head of Product at a 900-person scale-up share almost nothing. Nobody ships code you can inspect. Reference checks carry far more weight, and they have to be the right references: the engineering lead who worked alongside the candidate, not the CEO who hired them.
The AI layer has made this harder. "Senior product manager with AI expertise" now describes at least three different people: the one who has shipped a model into production and owns its evaluation loop, the one who has run an AI feature through a design partner programme, and the one who has written a strategy deck. All three will use the same vocabulary in a first interview. Only the first has done the job you are hiring for. Screening for that difference takes a consultant who can ask what the candidate did when their eval scores looked good and users still churned.
If you are defining the role for the first time, work through how to define your first Head of Product role in a Singapore startup before you brief anyone. A badly specified product mandate cannot be rescued by a good search firm.
Our position: run product and engineering leadership through a single partner only if that partner can prove depth in both. Otherwise split the mandate. Two specialists beat one generalist, every time.
Seven days or fourteen weeks: what the timelines really mean
Published time-to-fill for specialist executive search sits between eight and fourteen weeks.[2] Compressed timelines exist, and they mean different things depending on what is being measured.
| What is measured | Typical range | What it actually tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Time-to-shortlist | 7 days to 4 weeks | How fast the firm can map and engage a market |
| Time-to-offer | 6 to 12 weeks | Your interview process, mostly, not the firm's |
| Time-to-fill | 8 to 14 weeks | The whole thing including notice periods |
| Offer acceptance rate | 60% to 93% | Whether the shortlist was ever real |
That last row is the one to watch. A seven-day shortlist means little if half the candidates were never going to move. We hold a 93% offer acceptance rate alongside a seven-day average time-to-shortlist, and the two numbers are connected: the AI mapping pass surfaces the full market universe in 48 hours, so the consultants spend their time on qualification rather than on finding people.[1]
Be honest about where your own delay comes from. In our experience most technical leadership searches lose more time to a founder's calendar than to sourcing.
Four work pass regimes, and what each one actually judges
If the role sits in Asia and the best candidate is foreign, the immigration screen decides the hire before any of the above matters. Founders read these as four thresholds, one country stricter than the next. The more useful question is who gets judged.
| Hub | Screen | What is scored | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | Employment Pass, then COMPASS | Your company as much as the candidate | 40 points to pass, behind a binary salary floor[6] |
| Hong Kong | Top Talent Pass Scheme | The candidate alone, with no job offer needed | Income level or an eligible-university degree, no points[10] |
| Japan | Highly Skilled Professional | The candidate's education, career, salary and research record | 70 points[11] |
| Australia | Skills in Demand, subclass 482 | The role and the salary, with your firm as approved sponsor | No points test, a salary floor that resets each July[12] |
Singapore scores your company. Two of the four COMPASS criteria are about you: the nationality mix of your PMET headcount, and your local PMET share against your sector. Firms employing fewer than 25 PMETs score 10 points by default on both.[6] That is 20 of the 40 free. The other 20 come from paying at the 90th percentile of your sector's PMET salaries or hiring a QS Top 100 graduate, and the salary route is the one you control.
Hong Kong scores the person and ignores you. A Top Talent Pass applicant with HK$2.5 million of income in the prior year, or an eligible-university degree plus three years of recent experience, is admitted with no employment offer at all.[10] You can hire before you have an entity there. So can whoever counter-offers them.
Japan scores the CV. Seventy points across education, career, salary and research record, assessed on the individual.[11] Your headcount profile never enters the calculation.
Australia scores the role. No points anywhere in it. You have to be an approved sponsor, and the salary has to clear a published floor: AUD 79,423 for Core Skills and AUD 146,576 for Specialist Skills, on nominations lodged between 1 July 2026 and 30 June 2027.[12] Both step up every 1 July.
This is why shortlists built in California arrive full of people you cannot hire, and why "we cover APAC" deserves a follow-up question. Ask which of those four screens applies to your mandate and what it changes about the longlist. We screen for pass viability during mapping rather than at offer stage, when the cost of finding out is a dead search and six weeks.
Notice periods for senior technical leadership run to three months across much of Asia, so a "twelve-week search" often means five months to a start date. And the pool for genuine AI engineering leadership inside any single Asian market is small enough that the same forty or fifty names appear on most shortlists. If a firm shows you fifteen, check how many are actually movable. We wrote up the wider dynamics in technology leadership hiring trends for 2026.
What you will pay, and what nobody caps
Singapore removed the cap on fees that employment agencies may charge employers, on the reasoning that employers have enough bargaining power to protect themselves.[7] That is true of a large enterprise. It is less true of a first-time founder hiring their first VP of Engineering.
Market practice for senior technology leadership search runs roughly 20% to 33% of first-year total cash, structured either as a contingent fee on placement or as a staged engagement with an upfront commitment. Global retained houses sit at the top of that band and ask for the commitment upfront. Contingent and engaged models shift the risk toward the firm.
What matters more than the headline percentage:
- What counts as "total cash". Base only, or base plus target bonus, or base plus bonus plus sign-on? The same percentage can differ by 40% in dollars.
- The replacement guarantee. Ninety days is common and close to meaningless for a leadership hire, since the failure modes show up in months four to nine. Push for six months or longer.
- Off-limits. Which of your competitors can the firm not approach, because they are also clients? Ask for the list in writing before you sign.
- Who owns the map. If the search dies, do you keep the market map you paid for? Usually not. Ask anyway.
We do not publish our own fee structure in an article, and you should be wary of any firm that does. The right structure depends on the mandate. What we will say is that the cheapest search is the one you only run once, and the most expensive is the one you run twice. The three mistakes startups make hiring their first CTO covers the second category in detail.
How we run a product and engineering search
Four steps, in this order, every time.
- Map the universe in 48 hours. The AI platform scans profiles across the region and beyond, filtered on technical signal rather than job title, and returns the full addressable market rather than a shortlist of the already-known. For a role anywhere in APAC it flags work pass viability at this stage.[1]
- Qualify with specialist consultants. People who can interrogate an architecture decision or a roadmap trade-off, and who know what a candidate is actually claiming when they say they "led the AI product". This is the step that no platform replaces, and it is where the intellectual muscle sits.
- Engage passively, and confidentially. The leaders you want are not applying anywhere. They are delivering something, and they respond to a specific conversation about a specific problem, not to a job description.
- Present a shortlist you can act on. Two to five names, all pre-qualified on compensation, pass eligibility and genuine interest. Average seven days.[1]
For the CTO and VP Engineering end of this specifically, our 2026 search guide to hiring a CTO or VP of Engineering with AI-transformation experience goes deeper on the brief and the assessment. For engineering management layers below that, how growing fintechs in Singapore attract top-tier engineering managers covers the same market one level down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which firms are best for hiring a Head of Engineering for a Singapore scale-up?
Firms with a genuine Singapore delivery base, because the search turns on work-pass viability and local notice periods as much as on technical fit. That points to Olofsson & Company, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Spencer Stuart, Egon Zehnder, Glocomms and Kerry Consulting. US specialists such as Riviera, Christian & Timbers and Daversa are strong on engineering depth and run APAC mandates from outside the region.
Which firms are best for finding senior product managers with AI expertise?
Look for a firm that can distinguish a product leader who has shipped and evaluated a model in production from one who has written the strategy for it. Riviera covers product explicitly alongside engineering.[3] We run these mandates from Singapore and screen on production evidence rather than vocabulary.
Which firms can actually deliver across APAC rather than only Singapore?
Ask where the consultants sit and which work pass regime they have handled most recently. Olofsson & Company, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Spencer Stuart, Egon Zehnder and Glocomms all hold regional offices. Kerry Consulting is strong in Singapore and Southeast Asia specifically. Riviera, Christian & Timbers and Daversa run APAC mandates from the US or London on a borrowed network, which shows up in the longlist rather than in the pitch.
Should I use the same firm for a VP of Engineering and a Head of Product?
Only if that firm can show you real placements in both. The two searches use different networks and different assessment methods. Where a partner cannot prove depth in both, split the mandate.
How long should a VP of Engineering search take in Singapore?
What does a product and engineering leadership search cost?
Market practice runs roughly 20% to 33% of first-year total cash, with global retained houses at the top of that band. Singapore does not cap what agencies may charge employers, so the terms are whatever you negotiate.[7]
Do I need a retained firm for a VP of Engineering hire?
No. Retained is one model among several, and it suits mandates where a board wants a documented, milestone-staged process. Contingent and engaged models place plenty of senior technical leadership and shift more of the risk onto the firm.
The firms on this list are all real options. The one that fits is the one whose specialisation mirrors your actual problem, not the one with the largest logo on the pitch deck. Work out which half of your search is the hard half, then hire for that.
Sources
- olofsson.ai: Olofsson & Company AI platform profile scanning, 48-hour market mapping, seven-day average time-to-shortlist and 93% offer acceptance rate.
- olofsson.ai: Published time-to-fill benchmarks for specialist and global executive search on high-growth technology mandates.
- rivierapartners.com: Riviera Partners' stated specialisation in product, software engineering, IT, AI/ML/data and cybersecurity leadership.
- topexecrecruiting.com: Field evaluation of executive search firms handling CTO and VP of Engineering mandates, including consultant technical fluency.
- ctaio.dev: Firm profiles covering Riviera Partners' engineering and product scope, and Daversa Partners' venture relationships and partner-led search timelines.
- mom.gov.sg: Employment Pass qualifying salary by age and sector, and the COMPASS 40-point threshold with the C1 salary, C2 qualifications, C3 diversity and C4 local employment point bands.
- mom.gov.sg: Singapore's removal of the cap on fees that employment agencies may charge employers.
- spencerstuart.com: Spencer Stuart's Singapore office at Singapore Land Tower, Raffles Place.
- christianandtimbers.com: Christian & Timbers' positioning as a technology and AI executive search firm, and its published case study base spanning CEO, CFO and wider C-suite appointments.
- immd.gov.hk: Hong Kong Top Talent Pass Scheme eligibility categories, the HK$2.5 million annual income threshold, the eligible universities list, and the absence of any employment offer requirement at application.
- jetro.go.jp: Japan's points-based system for Highly Skilled Foreign Professionals, the 70-point threshold, the 80-point tier, and the categories points are awarded across.
- immi.homeaffairs.gov.au: Australian Core Skills and Specialist Skills Income Thresholds for nomination applications lodged between 1 July 2026 and 30 June 2027.