There comes a time in every startup’s journey when it becomes clear that engineering needs a dedicated leader. As is the case in most startups, my co-founder Laurent Perrin initially played the role of both CTO and head of engineering. But as the demands of being lead architect (his CTO responsibilities) became ever more important to scaling the business, we decided the time had come to bring in an experienced engineering leader who could manage the existing team, build the future team, implement the right processes, and so forth.

That’s why earlier this year, Shane Lowry joined Front as our Head of Engineering. With 20 years of experience in engineering leadership, Shane has the technical and management skills required to grow our complex, geographically distributed cloud service. More importantly, he brings a humble, collaborative, and creative approach to engineering that Laurent and I felt was critical to this role.

Because I know many founders struggle with when to bring in a head of engineering, I thought I’d share some insights into how Laurent and I approached this decision and the attributes we prioritized in our search.

When to hire a head of engineering

Here are some of the things we began to notice that made it clear we needed a dedicated head of engineering at Front:

Product lacked a single point of contact in engineering so individual engineering contributors were wasting time on process and prioritization tasks.

Engineers were questioning their career paths and a few were looking for new opportunities where they could make an impact without contributing code directly.

Coordinating work across our growing team of engineers was getting increasingly difficult.

A few engineers who have been with the company the longest were the only experts of the lion’s share of the core components and as a result, these usual suspects were the ones pulled into escalations and were at risk for burn out.

I was spending too much of my time interviewing and selling engineering candidates on Front.

What to look for

The CTO role differs a lot from company to company. Some CTOs stop coding quickly. Others want to remain in charge of key technical decisions, while not contributing to day-to-day code. Before beginning a head of engineering search, it’s important to understand the scope of your CTO’s role to ensure very little overlap between the two positions.

Regardless of where the lines are drawn, here is a short list of attributes I think all founders should look for in their first head of engineering: