Confidential — B2B SaaS Scale-Up
A Series-A B2B SaaS company serving mid-market operations teams across North America. Strong product-market fit, growing ARR, but an engineering team still wired like an early startup.
Services
Organizational Development
Psychometric Testing
Custom Pricing
Confidential Search
Industry
Software / SaaS
Company Size
85 Employees
Timeline
Permanent Placement
How a fast-growing B2B SaaS scale-up secured the VP of Engineering who turned a fragile platform into a real product organization.
The challenge
Leadership wanted a VP of Engineering who could scale the platform without breaking what was already working, and stay long enough to build a real product organization.
The company had grown fast on a small, talented founding engineering team, but the architecture was buckling under enterprise customers, hiring was slowing velocity, and the CEO was effectively acting as CTO on top of everything else. They needed a senior engineering leader who could own platform reliability, mature the SDLC, build out hiring and management, and partner credibly with Product and Sales — someone who had already scaled an org from sub-30 to 100+ engineers and was looking for a multi-year build, not a stepping stone.
The approach
A confidential, targeted search across operator-led SaaS companies. We optimized for staying power and product mindset, not résumé prestige.
We spent the first weeks with the CEO, CTO-acting founder, and lead investors mapping what the next three years actually required of this role: platform re-architecture, hiring 30 to 50 engineers, building managers, and a credible voice in the leadership team. From there we approached senior engineering leaders inside category-defining SaaS companies who had already done the 30-to-100 build and were ready to do it again — not VPs hopping every 18 months. Each finalist met the founders multiple times, talked to investors, and was vetted for cultural fit with a still-founder-led environment. We worked the search slowly on purpose: in this market, the right VP of Engineering is never on the job market.
The outcome
A single, well-chosen hire became the spine of a real product organization. The founders stopped firefighting code reviews, the platform stopped being the bottleneck, and the company is now built to scale through its next funding round and beyond.
VP of Engineering placed from within a category-leading SaaS company
Re-architected the core platform and stabilized enterprise reliability
Built out engineering management and tripled the team without losing velocity
Now a peer of the CEO on product, hiring and roadmap decisions
Two years in role, with the founders fully out of day-to-day engineering
Kernel found us someone we wouldn't have reached on our own. Two years in, engineering runs without me and we're shipping faster than ever.
Co-Founder & CEO
B2B SaaS Scale-Up (confidential)
More cases.
Trusted by more than 50 companies, from ambitious startups to major enterprises.
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg display="block" role="presentation" viewBox="0 0 42 12" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"/>)
